19. Yüzyılın Alman materyalizmi Fransa'da gelişen materyalizmin etkisi altındaydı.
Descartes (Dekart) bitki ve hayvanları, ruhları olmadığını ileri sürerek, birer makine olarak kabul ediyordu.
Lamettrie bu makine kuramını insana da aktarmıştı.
Bu makine kuramı geniş alanlara yayıldı ve bütün evren bir makine gibi görülmeye başlandı.
Although they were avid followers of the positivist doctrine as part of modern European scientific thought, the Young Turks always felt a deep attachment to the moral values of Islam and Ottoman culture. Well aware of this strong connection, Juan Enrique Lagarrique, a positivist activist, sent a critical letter to Ahmed Rıza from Santiago, Chile, which was published in 1901. In his letter, Lagarrique stated that he had examined the copy of the journal Mechveret sent to him by Rıza, and while he paid homage to the sincerity of Rıza’s efforts for l’avance of Turkey, Lagarrique considered a number of his views on religion as clear deviations from the genuine spirit of the Religion of Humanity and the ideas of Comte.
As Gottfried Gabriel describes, Carnap adopted concepts and strategies from Dilthey, redeploying them from his bracketing of metaphysics in the 1920s to his more radical confrontation with metaphysics and Heidegger’s ontology in the early 1930s.
Measurement and positivism are close kin. Auguste Comte coined the word 'positivism' as the name of his philosophy, holding that in all the European languages the word 'positive' had good connotations. His own philosophy did not fare especially well, but the word caught on. Positive science meant numerical science. Nothing better typified a positive science than a statistical one - an irony, for Comte himself despised merely statistical inquiries.
The Catholic philosopher Franz Brentano assumed his chair at the University of Vienna in 1874. Brentano claimed that “the true method of philosophy was no other than the method of the natural sciences.”51 In his inaugural lecture in Vienna Brentano declared that the guiding beacon for philosophy was “experience.”52 Brentano professed to “weed out” the “superstition” of “pompous” and “magnifed systems,” thereby striving to dismantle Herbartianism.53 Unbiased introspection should enable man to draw a precise boundary between psychical “acts” and physical “phenomena.” While Brentano’s empiricist credentials are substantiated by his plan to establish a psycho- logical laboratory, for Gomperz and his legatees Brentano’s philosophy was marred by the very doctrines of the “spirituality of the soul” that Herbart and his students also promoted.54
51. Franz Brentano (1929 [1893]) Über die Zukunft der Philosophie, ed. by Oskar Kraus (Leipzig: Meiner), 137.
52. Franz Brentano (1999) “Über die Gründe der Entmutigung auf philosophischem Gebiete. Ein Vortrag, gehalten beim Antritte der philosophischen Professur an der k.k. Hochschule zu Wien am 22. April 1874,” in Kurt Rudolf Fischer (ed.)Österreichische Philosophie von Brentano bis Wittgenstein. Ein Lesebuch (Vienna: WUV), 3–14, here 3.
53. Franz Brentano (1895) Meine letzten Wünsche für Oesterreich (Stuttgart:Cotta), 10, 31.