“Naturism” in Place of Idealism: Henri Ducrotay de Blainville and Auguste Comte on Naturphilosophie
Résumé
This study argues that the most significant impact of German absolute
idealism on French positivism is felt via the tradition of philosophy of nature. While
the philosophy of nature was inaugurated by Schelling, it is in fact through the work
of his successor, Lorenz Oken, that it enters into the positivist corpus. It was out of
an attempt to understand Oken’s significance for nineteenth-century biology that
Auguste Comte and also Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville took an interest in the
idealist tradition out of which Oken emerged. In this study, therefore, I detail Oken’s
reception in Blainville’s and Comte’s comments on the scale of beings and on
organic life. In the appendix, I give a summary of the chapter on Oken written by
Magdeleine de Saint-Agy and included in Georges Cuvier’s Histoire des sciences
naturelles.