Secular humanism is a philosophy, belief system or life stance that embraces human reason, secular ethics, and philosophical naturalism while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, and superstition as the basis of morality and decision making.
Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte was a French philosopher, mathematician and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Comte's ideas were also fundamental to the development of sociology; indeed, he invented the term and treated that discipline as the crowning achievement of the sciences.
Frederic Harrison was a British jurist and historian.
The positivist calendar was a calendar reform proposal by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in 1849. Revising the earlier work of Marco Mastrofini, or an even earlier proposal by "Hirossa Ap-Iccim", Comte developed a solar calendar with 13 months of 28 days, and an additional festival day commemorating the dead, totalling 365 days.
Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães was a Brazilian military officer and political thinker. Primarily a positivist, influenced heavily by Auguste Comte, he was the founder of the positivist movement in Brazil, and later this led to his republican views. He left the Brazilian Positivist Society because of internal disagreements, but remained an ardent pupil of Comte until the end of his life.
Postpositivism or postempiricism is a metatheoretical stance that critiques and amends positivism and has impacted theories and practices across philosophy, social sciences, and various models of scientific inquiry. While positivists emphasize independence between the researcher and the researched person, postpositivists argue that theories, hypotheses, background knowledge and values of the researcher can influence what is observed. Postpositivists pursue objectivity by recognizing the possible effects of biases. While positivists emphasize quantitative methods, postpositivists consider both quantitative and qualitative methods to be valid approaches.
The philosophy of social science is the study of the logic, methods, and foundations of social sciences. Philosophers of social science are concerned with the differences and similarities between the social and the natural sciences, causal relationships between social phenomena, the possible existence of social laws, and the ontological significance of structure and agency.
The London Positivist Society was an atheistic philosophical, humanist, and political circle that met in London, England, between May 1867 and 1974. The conditions of membership originally included "emancipation from theology and metaphysics and the acceptance of Comte's views on science and society". The Society's members occupied themselves in applying the ideas of the philosophical school of Comtean positivism to current affairs of the day, including the movement for home rule in Ireland, the Second Boer War, the strikes of London trade unionists, Egyptian Independence, the Indian independence movement and defence of the Paris Commune. Among their writings was the 1896 pamphlet Positivist Comments on Public Affairs. The Society also supported the founding of the Sociological Society of London. In 1934, it was renamed the English Positivist Committee.
Richard Congreve was the first English philosopher to openly espouse the Religion of Humanity, the godless form of religious humanism that was introduced by Auguste Comte, as a distinct form of positivism. Congreve was the first thinker to offer a systematic policy, on positivist lines, to dismantle the British Empire. In 1859, after issuing controversial anti-imperialist pamphlets on Gibraltar and India, he delivered his 'first sermon' as a Positivist apostle and 'vicar' of the Religion of Humanity. He later founded the London Positivist Society in 1867 and, after a schism with his closest followers in 1878, he broke off to formally found the Comtist Church of Humanity.
Pierre Laffitte was a French positivist philosopher.
Edward Spencer Beesly was an English positivist, trades union activist, and historian.
Positivism is an empiricist philosophical theory that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience. Other ways of knowing, such as theology, metaphysics, intuition, or introspection, are rejected or considered meaningless.
Religion of Humanity is a secular religion created by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the founder of positivist philosophy. Adherents of this religion have built chapels of Humanity in France and Brazil.
The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island is a satirical dystopian novel written by William Hurrell Mallock, and first published in 1878. It belongs to the wave of utopian and dystopian literature that characterized the later nineteenth century in both Great Britain and the United States.
A General View of Positivism is a 1844 book by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, first published in English in 1865. A founding text in the development of positivism and the discipline of sociology, the work provides a revised and full account of the theory Comte presented earlier in his multi-part The Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842). Comte outlines the epistemological view of positivism, provides an account of the manner by which sociology should be performed, and describes his law of three stages.
Shapland Hugh Swinny was an Irish economist and Comtean positivist.
Frederick James Gould was an English teacher, writer, and pioneer secular humanist.
Fabien Magnin was President of the Positivist Society.
Henry Crompton (1836–1904) was an English court clerk and barrister, known as an advocate of positivism and trade unions.
Meşveret was a bimonthly magazine which existed between 1895 and 1898. Published in Paris the magazine was the first official organ of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and was subtitled as “the media organ of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress". Its motto was ordo et progrès.
