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(1982) La philosophie contemporaine / Contemporary philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer.
In the Cours de philosophie positive (1842) August Comte described a process through which, he believed, all the sciences must pass, and a hierarchy among these subjects that supposedly reflects the order in which they pass through it and their relations of generality, if not also reducibility. This typology for the sciences and its associated sociology of science attracts little attention today, and it is usually treated as reflecting superficial, dogmatic and irrelevant speculation about the nature of science and its history. Nevertheless, Comte's views may well provide the initial motivation and the hidden agenda underlying contemporary philosophy of science's program of analysis for teleological claims and their uses. Comte claimed that human knowledge passes through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the postive. The first of these stages is characterized by the conviction that all events are to be explained by the citation of will, intention, purpose, on the model of ordinary explanations of human actions. In its animistic version, each object's behavior is explained by attributing human violation to it; in its theistic versions, natural phenomena are explained as reflecting one or more divine wills.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-9940-0_3
Full citation:
Rosenberg, A. (1982)., Causation and teleology in contemporary philosophy of science, in G. Fløistad (ed.), La philosophie contemporaine / Contemporary philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 51-86.
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