Positivism, Science and 'The Scientists' in Porfirian Mexico

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Priego
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Porfirio Diaz ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Leopoldo Zea

This book is intended for not only students and academics who undertake research on the history of Mexico during the half-century prior to the onset in 1910 of the Mexican Revolution, but also the parallel community of specialists on the history of ideas, philosophy and science throughout Latin America in this period. Its principal focus is to revisit the influential thesis of the Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea that the ideological group dubbed ‘the scientists’ by their opponents were guided by Positivism, particularly as interpreted by Herbert Spencer. It begins by reviewing previous research upon the formation and differentiation of ‘the scientists’, and the black legend which assumes that they legitimised the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Having established what Spencer himself believed and wrote, it analyses the prolific writings of two of the leading ‘scientists’, Francisco Bulnes and Justo Sierra. It explains the eclectic nature of their discourses, derived from the works of not only Spencer but also Charles Darwin, Auguste Comte and other European writers, which reached Mexico in a fragmented fashion. It concludes that, far from forming a homogeneous elite clearly committed to to a conservative insistence, derived from Spencerian Positivism, on political stability and modernisation, ‘the scientists’ had an ambivalent relationship with Díaz.

The Invention of Altruism

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Dixon
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Religion And Ethics ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religion Of Humanity ◽  
British Culture

‘Altruism’ was coined by the French sociologist Auguste Comte in the early 1850s as a theoretical term in his ‘cerebral theory’ and as the central ideal of his atheistic ‘Religion of Humanity’. This book traces this new language of ‘altruism’ as it spread through British culture between the 1850s and the 1900s, and in doing so provides a portrait of Victorian moral thought. Drawing attention to the importance of Comtean positivism in setting the agenda for debates about science and religion, this volume challenges received ideas about both Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as moral philosophers. Darwin saw sympathy and love, not only selfishness and competition, throughout the natural world. Spencer was the instigator of an Anti-Aggression League and an advocate of greater altruism in Britain’s dealings with the ‘lower races’. The book also sheds light on the rise of popular socialism in the 1880s, on the creation of the idealist ‘altruist’ in novels of the 1890s, and on the individualistic philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, and G. E. Moore—authors considered by some to be representative of fin de siècle ‘egomania’. This wide-ranging study in the history of ideas is relevant to contemporary debates about altruism, evolution, religion, and ethics.

The Historical Foundations of Symbolic Interactionism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Dingwall
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Interactionism ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Symbolic Interaction ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Plant Ecology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nature And Society

This chapter models a symbolic interactionist approach to the history of symbolic interactionism. It begins with a discussion of the term ‘symbolic interaction’ as devised by Herbert Blumer and the limits of its applicability to the body of work that represents this tradition. This owes at least as much to borrowings from plant ecology and evolutionary theory by sociologists in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, with influences from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Contemporary symbolic interactionism is distinguished from the post-modern version developed by Norman Denzin and associates; from the more structuralist legacy of Erving Goffman; and from ethnomethodology. The chapter then examines the influence of nineteenth century German philosophy and social thought on Chicago sociology. This is shown to draw on the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment, particularly the work of Adam Smith and David Hulme, which also had a direct influence of its own. Ultimately, the story leads back to Stoic thought in ancient Greece and Rome from around 300 BCE to around 180 CE. Although its leaders have not had a great interest in the history of the approach, it is a genuine heir to long-running debates about humanity, nature and society rather than a fringe novelty of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Psychiatry in descent: Darwin and the Brownes

1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (12) ◽  
pp. 748-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Walmsley
Keyword(s):  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Psychiatric Patients ◽  
History Of Psychiatry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
Italian School ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
General Terms ◽  
History Of

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) enjoys an uneasy position in the history of psychiatry. In general terms, he showed a personal interest in the plight of the mentally ill and an astute empathy for psychiatric patients. On the other hand, he has generated derogatory views of insanity, especially through the writings of English social philosophers like Herbert Spencer and Samuel Butler, the Italian School of “criminal anthropology” and French alienists including Victor Magnan and Benedict Morel.

Mexico, philosophy in

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
Academic Production ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Being ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Leopoldo Zea

Philosophy has been practised in Mexico for centuries, beginning with Nahuatl thought. Such thinking was rediscovered through laborious translation of surviving fragments of a document of exceptional value known as ‘Coloquio de los Doce’ (Debate of the Twelve) (1524). Since then, philosophy has come to enjoy a high degree of professionalization and a high quality of academic production. Generally, Mexican philosophical activity has evolved in accordance with world standards of rigour, information and quality of argumentation. In the twentieth century various philosophical groups have been created, namely the Ateneo de la Juventud, the contemporáneos and the Hyperion group. Leopoldo Zea understood the essence of the Mexican and the Latin American as a historical being with a historically situated consciousness. Zea’s history of ideas involved a philosophy of Latin American history which placed the being, destiny and meaning of the history of Mexico and Latin America in the context of the history of the world. The 1940s and 1950s were unusually productive to this end. In the 1970s small groupings of philosophers gathered to focus on problems, traditions, teaching figures, leaders and spheres of influence. There has been considerable interest in political philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of science and ethics. Since the 1980s, works about the history of ideas in Mexico and the history of science and technology have proliferated.

Revisiting the ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’: Multiple discovery and the rhetoric of priority

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110192
Author(s):  
Joel Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Research Infrastructures ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light

Between the 1930s and the mid 1970s, it was commonly believed that in 1880 Karl Marx had proposed to dedicate to Charles Darwin a volume or translation of Capital but that Darwin had refused. The detail was often interpreted by scholars as having larger significance for the question of the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary biology and Marxist political economy. In 1973–4, two scholars working independently—Lewis Feuer, professor of sociology at Toronto, and Margaret Fay, a graduate student at Berkeley—determined simultaneously that the traditional story of the proposed dedication was untrue, being based on a long-standing misinterpretation of the relevant correspondence. Between the two, and among several other scholars who became their respective allies, there developed a contest of authority and priority over the discovery. From 1975 to 1982, the controversy generated a considerable volume of spilled ink in both scholarly and popular publications. Drawing on previously unexamined archival resources, this article revisits the ‘case’ of the so-called ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’ as an instance of the phenomenon of ‘multiple discovery’. A familiar occurrence in the natural sciences, multiple discovery is rarer in the humanities and social sciences. The present case of a priority dispute in the history of ideas followed patterns familiar from such disputes in the natural sciences, while also diverging from them in ways that shed light on the significance of disciplinary norms and research infrastructures.

The History of Ideas: Substantive and Methodological Aspects of the Thought of Leopoldo Zea

1971 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles A. Hale
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Jose Ortega Y Gasset ◽  
National University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Existentialist Philosophy ◽  
Leopoldo Zea ◽  
Methodological Aspects

One of the most striking developments in Mexican historiography during the last twenty-five years is the burgeoning of the genre known as the ‘history of ideas’. The origins of the movement date back to 1925, when German historicist and existentialist philosophy made its entry into Mexico through the ideas of José Ortega y Gasset. More recently the impetus came from the seminar in the History of Ideas initiated at El Colegio de México and at the National University by the Spanish philosopher, José Gaos. So great has been the influence of Gaos that it is fair to say that until very recently die history of ideas or intellectual history in Mexico has been dominated by his students—men such as Luis Villoro, Francisco López Cámara, and Leopoldo Zea. Edmundo O'Gorman, while not a student of Gaos, shares his views and has come to be considered as a natural member of the history of ideas group.

scholarly journals Leopoldo Zea en Puerto Rico

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 2760-2769
Author(s):  
Vivian Auffant-Vázquez
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Latin American ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
American Institute ◽  
Thematic Content ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pan American ◽  
Leopoldo Zea ◽  
Collection History

Esta investigación presenta el contenido temático respecto al Primer  Seminario de Historia de las Ideas en Puerto Rico del 3 al 8 de diciembre de 1956 convocado por el Instituto Panamericano  de Geografía e Historia, institución que  patrocina a la Colección Historia de las Ideas de América  la cual dirige el Dr. Leopoldo Zea  en 1956. Esta participación intelectual es la primera en Puerto Rico del filósofo mexicano. En ella se enlaza la Isla a la corriente  filosófica latinoamericana. Este aspecto lo destacará Zea posteriormente  en un artículo del tomo publicado  sobre el Sesquicentenario de Eugenio María de Hostos  celebrado en 1989.   This research presents the thematic content of the First Seminar on History of Ideas in Puerto Rico from December 3 to 8, 1956, convened by the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, institution that sponsors the Collection History of Ideas of America, directed by Dr. Leopoldo Zea in 1956. This intellectual participation is the first in Puerto Rico of the Mexican philosopher. It links the island to the Latin American philosophical current. Zea will emphasize this aspect later in an article of the volume published on the Sesquicentennial of Eugenio Maria de Hostos celebrated in 1989.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McElvenny
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This chapter sets the scene for the case studies that follow in the rest of the book by characterising the ‘age of modernism’ and identifying problems relating to language and meaning that arose in this context. Emphasis is laid on the social and political issues that dominated the era, in particular the rapid developments in technology, which inspired both hope and fear, and the international political tensions that led to the two World Wars. The chapter also sketches the approach to historiography taken in the book, interdisciplinary history of ideas.

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