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positivism

Noun

Meaning

A system of philosophy originated by M. Auguste Comte, which deals only with positives. It excludes from philosophy everything but the natural phenomena or properties of knowable things, together with their invariable relations of coexistence and succession, as occurring in time and space. Such relations are denominated laws, which are to be discovered by observation, experiment, and comparison. This philosophy holds all inquiry into causes, both efficient and final, to be useless and unprofitable.

Source: Webster's dictionary

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[...]the simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts. Hannah Arendt

I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Positivism too, unless I misunderstand that system. Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Never indulge in people who follow a negative path because they will take you with them on the road of ruin. Show them the way to positivism even if there's a risk of losing their friendship. Siddharth Katragadda

The radical empiricist onslaught ... provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals-a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior. Herbert Marcuse

Positivism ... implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he or she tells is usually a bad one, and its being obvious only means that it is familiar. Bernard Williams

Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God... It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin. Joris-Karl Huysmans

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