ABSTRACT

Auguste Comte's originality, Johan Heilbron claims, actually lies in the area of his primary concern, namely, providing a general theory of science that stresses the historical determinateness of scientific practice and the irreducible ontological variability of its objects. According to Heilbron, Comte's theory was his response to an initial "dilemma", one at once "political" and "mathematical", and it is best understood through its "social dynamics" Comte's "historical and differential theory of science inaugurated an original tradition in epistemology" that for a while dominated French social thought at a time when Paris was recognized as the "international capital" for innovative social theory. Comte makes his law the basis of his own reflective defense of positive philosophy itself. Comte realizes that one advantage of positive philosophy is that analyzing "the general traits of the sciences" facilitates scientific progress; but even here, his reasoning has an extra-scientific focus.