4.2 The sort of the sciences and philosophy of science
The second pillar of positive philosophy, the virtue of the smorgasbord of the sciences, has withstood the test of time much better than the law of the three stages. Of the various miscellaneas that have been proposed, it is Comtes that is still the most democratic today. This classification, too, structures the Course, which examines each of the six fundamental sciencesmathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociologyin turn. It provides a course to do justice to the diversity of the sciences without thereby losing sight of their unity. This classification also makes Comte the founder of the philosophy of science in the mod sense. From Plato to Kant, reflection on science had always occupied a central place in philosophy, but the sciences had to be sufficiently developed for their diversity to manifest itself. It was thanks to his education at the Ãcole Polytechnique that Comte, from 1818, began to develop the concept of a philosophy of science. At about the same time Bolzano wrote his Wissenschaftslehre (1834) and Mill his System of logical system (1843), Comtes Course presented in sequence a philosophy of mathematics, of astronomy, of physics, of chemistry, of biology, and of sociology.
Comtes classification is meant not to restore a chimerical unity, but to distract the fragmentation of knowledge. Thanks to it, the sciences are related to one some other in an encyclopedic scale that goes from the general to the particular, and from the simple to the complicated: moving from mathematics to sociology, generality decreases and complexity increases.
The law of classification of the sciences also has a historical aspect: it gives us the entrap in which the sciences develop. For example, astronomy requires mathematics, and chemistry requires physics. Each science and so rests upon the one that precedes it. As Comte puts it, the higher depends on the lower, but is not its result. The recognition of an...If you want to get a full essay, disposition it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com
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