Historical Tendencies on Social Sciences

Historical Tendencies on Social Sciences

1. Scientific Revolution

   • Science emerged as a distinct mode of inquiry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during a period known as the Scientific Revolution
   • The period of great advances in the sciences, roughly 1500-1700
   • Copernicus placed the sun at the center of the universe, rather than the earth.
     • Galileo put forth the basic principle of relativity (the laws of physics are the same in any system that is moving at a constant speed in a straight line).
       • Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) is responsible for creating Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

2. Empiricism

   • Empiricism about concepts is the view that our concepts derive in some sense from our experiences.
   • Philosophical empiricists hold no knowledge to be properly inferred or deduced unless it is derived from one's sense-based experience.
   • Hume denied that inductive inference can be justified by logical argument, but he defended a wider conception of rationality (or at least sensible action) based on our natural impulses to believe and act

3. Rationalism,

   • The first Western philosopher to stress rationalist insight was Pythagoras, a shadowy figure of the 6th century . Noticing that, for a right triangle, a square built on its hypotenuse equals the sum of those on its sides and that the pitches of notes sounded on a lute bear a mathematical relation to the lengths of the strings
   • Rationalism is a philosophical movement which gathered momentum during the Age of Reason of the 17th Century. It is usually associated with the introduction of mathematical methods into philosophy during this period by the major rationalist figures, Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza
   • René Descartes is one of the earliest and best known proponents of Rationalism. He believed that knowledge of eternal truths could be attained by reason alone, without the need for any sensory experience.
     • Baruch Spinoza's philosophy centred on several principles, most of which relied on his notion that God is the only absolute substance and that substance is composed of two attributes, thought and extension
       • Gottfried Leibniz attempted believed that ideas exist in the intellect innately, but only in a virtual sense, and it is only when the mind reflects on itself that those ideas are actualized.
         • Nicolas Malebranche posited that although humans attain knowledge through ideas rather than sensory perceptions, those ideas exist only in God, so that when we access them intellectually, we apprehend objective truth

4. Evolutionism

   • In the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology
   • Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection gave a more rational explanation of the formation of new species. As per natural selection, various species originated from a single species as a result of adaptation to the changing environment.
   • It's a scientific theory of the origin of species of plants and animals

5. Positivism

   • Comte explains that, in its quest for truth the society passes through three successive evolution phases
   • Positivism is a philosophical theory stating that certain ("positive") knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations
   • It's a philosophical system founded by Auguste Comte, concerned with positive facts and phenomena, and excluding speculation upon ultimate causes or origins.

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