ABSTRACT
In the social sciences the first self-conscious proclamation of the positivist view came from Auguste Comte. He followed the optimistic impulses of Diderot and other French Enlightenment philosopher in extending Bacon's ideas about the study of nature to the social. Although it is customary to trace philosophical ancestors back to the early Greeks, the more proximate origins of positivist epistemology lie in that blooming of European thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even though the Renaissance and Enlightenment picture of the intellectual darkness of the Middle Ages was overdrawn, these later centuries saw tremendous changes in ways of thinking, particularly through the beginnings of modern science but also in social and political thought. Positivism recognised only two bona fide forms of knowledge, the empirical and the logical: the former represented by natural science and the latter by logic itself and also by mathematics.
