Condillac's Puerile Reveries - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

Condillac's Puerile Reveries

Laurent Clauzade

Résumé

This chapter deals with the reception of Condillac in the philosophy of Auguste Comte and, in particular, Comte’s discussion of the status of human abilities in relation to Gall’s cerebral physiology, to which Comte fully adheres. On the issue of intellectual and moral faculties, Comte and Gall indeed endorsed an anti-sensationalist position which led them both to reject en bloc the thesis of transformed sensation. This rejection, however, conceals an unquestionable agreement with Condillac on the nature of the so-called animal faculties. The second point of divergence concerns the analytical method and the heuristic value of decomposition. Here Auguste Comte’s holism functions the anthesis of Condillac’s logic. The third point, finally, deals with algebra and Condillac’s thesis that mathematics is a well-formed language. After having endorsed this thesis during his youth, Comte later strongly opposed it, arguing against the importance of language for scientific reasoning. All these disagreements would eventually lead to the marginalisation of the sensationalist and analytic tradition within French empiricist philosophy.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-04250509 , version 1 (19-10-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Laurent Clauzade. Condillac's Puerile Reveries: the Reception of Condillac in Phrenology and in the Philosophy of Auguste Comte. Delphine Antoine-Mahut; Anik Waldow. Condillac and His Reception, 1, Routledge, pp.137-151, 2023, (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy), 9781000987898. ⟨10.4324/9781003334750-11⟩. ⟨hal-04250509⟩
26 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More