Tricia Anne M.

Castro August 9, 2019

10A Ms. Clarence

Persuasion as Solution in Book One of Homer’s “The Iliad” Commented [CA1]: Title should NOT be a sentence. It
should be typed in bold, Title Case, and Centered.
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) lived and experienced the reformation of the society

from a mercantilist society to a socialist society brought about by the French revolution Commented [CA2]: Left justified

which occurred in 1786. The French Revolution manifested the desire of the majority for

land ownership and the minority’s desire for dominance in land ownership. It is due to

this reason that the French Revolution broke out. Comte then believed that land

ownership or private property leads to chaos and revolutions which we all know destroys

the society. For Comte, society is the place where man cultivates his happiness. Anything

outside the society (like the metaphysical world) cannot make man happy. He said that

one should study man in society since he is a social animal. Man can only attain

happiness in society. For Comte, the answer is the positive sciences.

Positivism is the philosophy which rejects “facts” which are outside the facts

themselves. For Comte, real knowledge is scientific knowledge. Facts are which we

perceive through our senses. In the line “I will take a girl myself, your own, Aias’, or

Odysseus’ prize! Take her, yes, to keep. The man I visit may choke with rage; well, let

him.” (Book One, 162-165), he came up with the term positive knowledge which means Commented [CA3]: Italicize quotations from the book.
Commented [CA4]: Place in parenthesis the Chapter and
that which adds to your knowledge. If it adds to your knowledge then it must be good for page number the uote appears.

man and he will therefore be happy. For one to understand how Comte derived the idea

of sociology and his interest in socialism, one must look at the time contemporaneous to

Comte’s time: the French Revolution, the rise of Socialism.

 There have been questions whether to consider social sciences (such as sociology

and economics) a science, but the answer is that they are not exact sciences. This is so

because every human being is different and has freedom, therefore, you cannot generalize

his reactions and behavior. All one can do with the social sciences is to make

probabilities. Two universities during the neo-Kantian movement in 1860’s (the Marburg

and the Baden Universities) in Germany proposed a solution to this question. They said

that the social sciences can be scientific provided that the methodology is different

because of man’s rationality. They said that man has two intellects: one is reason (his

rational experiences); and the second is living experience (where you exclude

mathematics, and instead, express one’s experience through the arts which you cannot

quantify). This problem has evolved even during this century, the 20th Century.

Twentieth century sociology involves the inclusion of metaphysics. It includes the

transcendent dimension of man.

References:

Homer. (2004). The iliad (R. Fitzgerald, Trans.). NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Commented [CA5]: APA Format

Book’s Lexile: 1,000L

My Lexile: 950L