Audiobook Learning's video: Positivism Auguste Comte and Positivism by John Stuart MILL Full Audiobook Part 4

Positivism is part of a more general ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, notably laid out by Plato and later reformulated as a quarrel between the sciences and the humanities, Plato elaborates a critique of poetry from the point of view of philosophy in his dialogues Phaedrus 245a, Symposium 209a, Republic 398a, Laws 817 b-d and Ion. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 – 1911) popularized the distinction between Geisteswissenschaft (humanities) and Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences). The consideration that laws in physics may not be absolute but relative, and, if so, this might be more true of social sciences,[9] was stated, in different terms, by G. B. Vico in 1725. Vico, in contrast to the positivist movement, asserted the superiority of the science of the human mind (the humanities, in other words), on the grounds that natural sciences tell us nothing about the inward aspects of things.