The Philosophy of Mathematics: "A True Definition of Mathematics"

About the Author

Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (1798 - 1857), better known as Auguste Comte was a French philosopher. He was a founder of the dis-cipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He is sometimes regar-ded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Influenced by the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed thepositive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French Revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His concept of Sociologie and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology presented by Emile Durkheim as practical and objective social research. Comte's social theories culminated in the "Religion of Humanity", which influenced the development of religious humanist and secular humanist orga-nizations in the 19th century. Comte likewise coined the word altruisme (altruism). Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier, Herault on 19 January 1798. After attending the Lycee Joffre and then theUniversity of Montpellier, Comte was admitted to the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. Comte also developed a close friendship with John Stuart Mill. From 1844, he fell deeply in love with the Catholic Clotilde de Vaux, although because she was not divorced from her first husband their love was never consummated. After her death in 1846 this love became quasireligious, and Comte, working closely with Mill (who was refining his own such system) developed a new "Religion of Humanity". John Kells Ingram, an adherent of Comte, visited him in Paris in 1855. He published four volumes of Systeme de politique positive (1851-1854). His final work, the first volume of "La Synthese Subjective" ("The Subjective Synthesis"), was published in 1856.