positivistn.adj.

1853 Southern Q. Rev. 8 322 Comte, the positivist, and exclusive advocate of science.

1868 Sat. Rev. 25 Apr. 541/2 Christians and Positivists are agreed in acknowledging the higher virtues of self-sacrifice.

1892 Monist 2 295 The conceptions of philosophy held by the criticist, the positivist, and the evolutionist.

1936 A. J. Ayer Lang., Truth & Logic i. 23 Some positivists have adopted the heroic course of saying that these general propositions are indeed pieces of nonsense.

1958 G. J. Warnock Eng. Philos. since 1900 58 The Positivists were also engaged in linguistic analysis, officially without metaphysical ambitions; theirs was supposed to be the two-sided task, on the one hand of exposing the muddles of metaphysicians, and on the other hand of humbly clarifying the vocabularies of the scientist and the mathematician.

1971 J. H. Haddox Antonio Caso 86 To the cowardly positivists frightened by the idea of ‘mental anarchy’ I say, no.

1997 N. Walter Humanism 39 The Humanitarians and Positivists were attempting to rescue religion from the superstitious errors or theology.

2005 T. Burger Truth, Thought, Reason Introd. 5 The positivists took their paradigm science to be physics. Frege's paradigm science was mathematics.

1927 M. R. Cohen in Proc. 6th Internat. Congr. Philos., 1926 469 It is therefore easy..to show that other positivists are full of hidden or unavowed natural law.

1948 C. Eagleton Internat. Govt. (rev. ed.) i. ii. §11 43 It has been customary, since the days of Grotius, to classify writers on international law into three schools: natural lawyers, positivists, and eclectics or Grotians, who drew from the former two.

1971 Mod. Law Rev. 34 vi. 631 Most positivists, and certainly Hart, would argue that legal rules can never be spelled out in terms of all the situations to which they might be relevant.

1999 Texas Law Rev. (Nexis) 77 1375 Only extreme natural lawyers may think that only pure justice matters; only extreme positivists, noninterpretivists, advocates of judicial restraint, and plain meaning theorists may think that only prior authoritative acts (or history) matters.

1856 H. Edger (title) The Positivist calendar.

1880 Christian World 8 Jan. 25/1 The Positivist creed, stated in its best form, is that man's chief end is to glorify man and to enjoy himself now.

1889 T. H. Huxley in 19th Cent. Feb. 191 The incongruous mixture of bad science with eviscerated papistry, out of which Comte manufactured the Positivist religion.

1900 W. L. Courtney Idea of Trag. 61 Auguste Comte, the Positivist philosopher, added to the list of sciences the most modern of all—sociology.

1934 Philos. Sci. 1 16 In using the formal mode of expression the pseudo-problem ‘What is a thing?’ disappears, and therewith the opposition between the positivist and the realist answer disappears.

1943 W. G. Hardy Some Semantic Theories in Cornell Univ. Abstr. of Theses 56 Bridgman's operational theory of meaning amounts to a positivist demand that meanings be assigned according to the operations performed.

1960 J. O. Urmson Conc. Encycl. Western Philos. 324/1 In the twenties of the twentieth century Hume's positivist arguments were revived and strengthened.

1974 Nature 16 Aug. 609/1 Most philosophers of science, at least within the dominant positivist schools, take the Comtean view, of physics as the paradigmatic science.

1980 A. C. Thiselton Two Horizons ii. iii. 84 He [sc. Pannenberg] shows that Troeltsch's approach..indirectly imoies a positivist metaphysic which is smuggled through under the guise of being a ‘modern’ understanding of history.

2001 S. Hawking Universe in Nutshell ii. 59 From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy,..one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in.

1923 R. Pound Interpr. Legal Hist. iv. 78 The positivist ethnological interpretation [of legal history]..was given a comparative basis.

1944 W. Friedmann Legal Theory xv. 135 The number and variety of positivist legal theories is as great as that of the sciences.

1976 Howard Jrnl. 15 i. 51 The change from a classical to a positivist approach to criminology..took the form of a belief in the biological and social causation of crime and the necessity for early prevention.

2000 Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. (Nexis) 94 246 While Rubin may exaggerate his position as a lone voice defending the positivist viewpoint, his circumstances are familiar in the history of international law.