Auguste comte profile

Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857)

By mackenzie_razo

  • Positivism

    Comte is widely known as the creator of positivism. According to Caspar Hewitt in his article, Comte "represents a general retreat from Enlightenment humanism that has continued to this day" (The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, 2008). What this means is that instead of using things like religion to help explain things, he preferred to focus only on things he could prove with the scientific method. This way of thinking stemmed from Saint-Simon, but became more developed thanks to Comte.

  • The Law of Three Stages

    The Law of Three Stages
    One of Comte's most widely known contributions is "The Law of Three Stages." In this law, it states that throughout humanities development, it was gone through three successive stages: The Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Positive. The first is "the necessary starting point for the human mind" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Auguste Comte, 2018). The second of the three stages allows the mind to pass from the first to the third, and the third stage is the human minds normal state.

  • Religion of Humanity

    In the third stage, Comte believed humanity would toss aside religion and start to rely on positivism (meaning they would only believe in things that could be observed). Comte worried that since humanity had been relying on religion for so long, that it would leave a hole where religion would normally be. To combat this, he discovered the Religion of Humanity (check out the link for a short video). [https://www.britannica.com/video/186415/Auguste-Comte-attempts-philosophy-humanity-religion]

  • Positivist Calendar

    Positivist Calendar
    Comte created and proposed a 13 month calendar. His reasoning? To accommodate his Religion of Humanity. His calendar has 13 months, each with exactly four weeks (28 days). In addition, there was an annual festival dedicated to celebrating the dead, and on leap year a festival dedicated to women (An all to Human Comte, 2014). One person was chosen to represent each month, for example the first month was "The Initial Theocracy: Moses." While this does simplify things, it never caught on.