Positivism vs. Existentialism
Here, we focus on two of the most influential intellectual movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: positivism and existentialism. We illustrate this by focusing on two of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell, the British logician and philosopher (positivism), and John-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist. Both were important public figures of the twentieth century as well as influential thinkers.
Positivism is the view that all the objective knowledge we can have comes through science, that is through experience, experimentation, and observation, filtered through the scientific method.
Existentialists emphasize the engaged and unique experiences of individual persons- personal existence-from which existentialism gets its name.
The two views are diametrically opposed in many ways.
While positivists emphasize objective scientific truth, existentialists speak of what Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard, the first modern existentialist, called "subjective truth"-the truth I am and live rather than the truth I know in a detached way.
While positivists emphasize abstract reasoning as truth revealing (as in science and mathematics), existentialists emphasize concrete experience and emotions as revelatory of the human condition.
While positivists incline toward scientific accounts of human behavior in terms of heredity and environment, existentialists tend to emphasize individual freedom. We are not entirely made by nature, but make ourselves by our own free choices.
Source credit: Professor Robert H. Kane, The University of Texas at Austin
Here, we focus on two of the most influential intellectual movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: positivism and existentialism. We illustrate this by focusing on two of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell, the British logician and philosopher (positivism), and John-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist. Both were important public figures of the twentieth century as well as influential thinkers.
Positivism is the view that all the objective knowledge we can have comes through science, that is through experience, experimentation, and observation, filtered through the scientific method.
Existentialists emphasize the engaged and unique experiences of individual persons- personal existence-from which existentialism gets its name.
The two views are diametrically opposed in many ways.
While positivists emphasize objective scientific truth, existentialists speak of what Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard, the first modern existentialist, called "subjective truth"-the truth I am and live rather than the truth I know in a detached way.
While positivists emphasize abstract reasoning as truth revealing (as in science and mathematics), existentialists emphasize concrete experience and emotions as revelatory of the human condition.
While positivists incline toward scientific accounts of human behavior in terms of heredity and environment, existentialists tend to emphasize individual freedom. We are not entirely made by nature, but make ourselves by our own free choices.
Source credit: Professor Robert H. Kane, The University of Texas at Austin
