As a philosophical ideology and movement, Positivism first assumed its

distinctive features in the work of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who also named and systematized the science of sociology.

It then developed through several stages known by various names, such as Empiriocriticism, Logical Positivism, and Logical Empiricism, and finally, in the mid-20th century, flowed into the movement known as

Analytic and Linguistic philosophy.

The basic affirmations of Positivism are (1) that all knowledge

regarding matters of fact is based on the "positive" data of experience, and (2) that beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure

mathematics, which were already recognized by the Scottish Empiricist

and Skeptic David Hume as concerned with the "relations of ideas" and, in a later phase of Positivism, were classified as purely formal sciences. On the negative and critical side, the Positivists became noted for their repudiation of metaphysics; i .e., of speculation regarding the nature of reality that radically goes beyond any possible evidence that could either support or refute such "transcendent" knowledge claims. In its basic ideological posture, Positivism is thus worldly, secular, antitheo logical, and antimetaphysical. Strict adherence to the

testimony of observation and experience is the all-important imperative of the Positivists. This imperative is reflected

also in their contributions to ethics and moral philosophy, and most Positivists have been Utilitarians to the extent that something like "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people" was their ethical maxim. It is notable, in this connec tion, that Auguste Comte was the founder of a short-lived religion, in which the object of worship was not the deity of the monotheistic faiths but humanity.

There are distinct anticipations of Positivism in ancient philosophy.

Though the relationship of Protagoras--a 5th-century-BC Sophist--for example, to later Positivistic thought was only a distant one, there was a much more pronounced similarity in the classical Skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who lived at the turn of the 3r d century AD,

and in Pierre Bayle, his 17th-century reviver. Moreover, the medieval

Nominalist William of Ockham had clear affinities with modern Positivism. An 18th-century forerunner who had much in common with the Positivistic antimetaphysics of the following century was the German thinker Georg Lichtenberg.

Positivism clearly has its proximate roots, however, in the French

Enlightenment, which stressed the clear light of reason, and in the 18th-century British Empiricism, particularly that of Hume and of Bishop George ,Berkeley, which stressed the role of sense experience. Comte was influenced specifically by the Enlight enment Encyclopaedists (such as Denis Diderot, Jean d'Alembert, and others) and, especially in his social thinking, was decisively influenced by the founder of French Socialism, Claude-Henri, comte de Saint-Simon, whose disciple he had been in his early years and from whom the very designation Positivism stems.