Quotes About Positivism

If you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.

The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.

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.

The central argument of structuralism is in essence a restatement of the discredited argument of linguistic positivism that language is the only reality since knowledge can only be expressed and communicated in linguistic form.

La negatividad no puede mantenerse sin algo a lo que aferrarse. El positivismo y la felicidad pueden existir sin ninguna razón.

Wisdom is an absolute positivism which regards only what can be grasped by direct experience as real, and everything else as unreal, abstract, and illusory.

See Sean Coyle, "Thomas Hobbes and the Intellectual Origins of Legal Positivism," Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 16 (2003), 243–270; Mark Murphy, "Was Hobbes a Legal Positivist?," Ethics 105 (1995), 846–873.

Because positivism (which repudiated the possibility of a theological or metaphysical explanation of reality) had failed, all that was left for secular society was "cynicism or some mystical leap to knowing.

In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're scrambled.

In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that anyway you turn them they are sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that anyway you turn them they are scrambled.

The crisis of European jurisprudence began a century ago with the victory of legal positivism.

True law is not imposed; it arises from unintentional developments. (...)Law emerges (...) as something not merely legislated but given. The later positivism knows no origin and has no home. It recognizes only causes or basic norms. It seeks to be the opposite of "unintended" law. Its ultimate goal is control and calculability.

I mean, there's got to be an art to expounding the virtues of logical positivism while garrotting Nazis with piano wire, and it looks as if Jarrod started missing their special flair.

She influenced by the positivism of her race, was gazing into the future. While he was content with the present moment, not caring to know what would be the end of their love

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

To expect a fact, is by definition to expect the isolated, it is for positivism, to prefer the 'accident' to the essential, the contingent to the necessary, disorder to order; it is in principle to reject the essential in the future:

I am an eternal optimist. I always say 'Yihyeh Tov' or 'It'll get better.'

I'm a huge optimist.

I'm happy to admit that I'm a hopeless optimist.

To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.

The notion that scientific truth directly fosters moral goodness — a legacy of gifted but in this respect misguided amateurs of science like Diderot and Goethe — was receding in the nineteenth century before positivistic procedures which sharply differentiated facts from values.

Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren.

Surround yourself with 'yay-sayers' not naysayers.

Comte's positivism and "stages of development" theory and the Hegel-Marx historicism are kindred and lay the foundation for modern progressivism. They all presume to know and establish the final stage of human development (even if the final stage is in a state of constant remaking), denounce organized religion and timeless truths, and worship the narcissism of their own moral nihilism