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Historians of philosophy have hitherto either given scant attention to Cournot and Renouvier's views on scientific revolution, tried to read Kuhn's concept of scientific revolution back into their works, or did not fully appreciate the extent to which these philosophers were reflecting on the works of their predecessors as well as on developments in mathematics and the sciences. Cournot's views on cumulative development through revolution resemble Comte's more than Kuhn's, and his notion of progressive theoretical simplicity through revolution recalls Whewell's philosophy of science. Renouvier, far from regarding a scientific revolution as resulting in a new set of conceptual boxes imposing a conformity of thought on the scientific community, recognized that a new theory proposed during a revolution is open to more than one interpretation., Author(s): Warren Schmaus [sup.1] [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.62813.3e, 0000 0004 1936 7806, Department of Humanities, Illinois Institute of Technology, , 10 W 35th Street, 60616, Chicago, IL, USA (2) [...]

The Durkheimian concept of the density of social relationships may prove more fruitful than the historical materialist notion of a social hierarchy for thinking about the social location of epistemic agents in science. To define a scientist's social location in terms of the density of her professional relationships with other scientists permits us to give a more precise characterization of marginalization and thus to formulate more testable hypotheses about marginalized groups in science. The notion of social density helps to explain not only how some individual scientists are more likely than others to get a hearing for their ideas, but also how scientific inquiry flourishes more in some societies than in others.

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00454.x Byline: Warren Schmaus (1) Author Affiliation: (1)Illinois Institute of Technology

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2006.12.011 Byline: Warren Schmaus Keywords: Charles Renouvier; Auguste Comte; Positivism; Hypothesis; Eclectic spiritualism Abstract: Renouvier was among the first philosophers in France to break with the nineteenth-century inductivist tradition and defend the use of hypotheses in science. Earlier in the century, the humanistically-educated eclectic spiritualist philosophers who dominated French academic life had followed Reid in proscribing the use of hypotheses. Renouvier, who was educated in the sciences, took up the Comtean positivist alternative and developed it further. He began by defending hypotheses that anticipate laws governing the phenomena, but then eventually adopted a more liberal attitude towards hypotheses that postulate unobservable entities and processes as well. He also came to the realization that, from an epistemological point of view, all of empirical science is hypothetical. Renouvier used the tentative character of scientific knowledge as a premise from which to critique those who would claim scientific status for their social philosophies, and maintained a distinction between normative philosophical and empirical scientific inquiries. Author Affiliation: Lewis Department of Humanities, Illinois Institute of Technology, 3301 S Dearborn, Chicago, IL 60616, USA Article History: Received 9 June 2005; Revised 10 July 2006

It would appear to be the neopositivism or logical positivism of the Vienna Circle more than the positivism of Auguste Comte. Comtean positivism played a role in the constitution of a "French style" in history and philosophy of science, which includes, in various ways, Abel Rey, Gaston Bachelard, George Canguilhem, and even Michel Foucault. From the start, philosophers such as Antoine-Augustin Cournot and Charles Renouvier often turned to historical counterexamples in their critiques of Comte's philosophy of science. In the I Cours i he frequently uses the term philosophy with a defining adjective, speaking of mathematical philosophy, astronomical philosophy, physical philosophy, chemical philosophy and biological philosophy. [Extracted from the article]

Evolutionary psychologists regard DurkheimEs sociology as an exemplar of an approach that takes the human mind to be a product of social and cultural factors with negligible contributions from biology. It is argued that the sociological theory of the categories is compatible with the possibility of innate cognitive capacities.