Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte by Tony Touillon.
Born	Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte (1798-01-19)19 January 1798 Montpellier, France
Died	5 September 1857(1857-09-05) (aged 59) Paris, France
Nationality	French
Alma mater	University of Montpellier École Polytechnique
Spouse(s)	Caroline Massin (m. 1825–1842)
Notable ideas	Positivism, law of three stages, encyclopedic law, altruism
Influences Bacon, Bichat, Condorcet, Descartes, Saint-Simon,Denis Diderot
Influenced Émile Littré, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim, Charles Maurras,Harriet Martineau, Pierre Laffitte, Eugen Dühring

Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte (/ˈɪzədɔːr oʊˈɡuːst məˈriː frænˈsweɪ seɪvi.ər kɒəmˈteɪ/; 19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857) was a French philosopher who founded the discipline of sociology, coining the term, and the doctrine of positivism. He is sometimes regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.

Influenced by the utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French Revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.