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Birth of Comte
Auguste Francois Xavier Comte was born in Montpellier, France. The French philosopher was known as the founder of sociology and of positivism. Comte gave the science of sociology its name and established the new subject in a systematic fashion. When he was young, he was well educated, and obsessed with the idea of building a new kind of France based around science and republicanism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhVamhT4Q3s&index=2&list=PLwxNMb28XmpcoeCDO0VnGUavcLUFiNcAI -
Early Life
Comte’s father, Louis Comte, and his mother, Rosalie Boyer, were royalist and deeply sincere Roman Catholics. Their sympathies were at odds with the republicanism and skepticism. Comte resolved these conflicts at an early age by rejecting Roman Catholicism and royalism alike. He was intellectually curious and in 1814 entered the École Polytechnique a school in Paris that had been founded for advanced sciences. -
Beginning Philosophy
After leaving the Ecole and his family. He moved to Paris where he became a student of and later secretary to the utopian thinker Henri de Saint-Simon. Comte eventually split with Saint-Simon and for the rest of his life wrote works about the reform of humanity. -
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Major Works
He developed his major work, “Positive Philosophy”, while he was hospitalized for the course of 15 years. This work of his explained that society has its own set of laws under which it is operated, similar to the physical world. In another contribution, the “Religion of Humanity”, he let out the idea of an improved religious order that emphasized more on reason and humanity. (Comte, Auguste, and Harriet Martineau. The Positive Philosophy. AMS Press, 1974)
