Hippolyte Taine summary

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Hippolyte Taine, (born April 21, 1828, Vouziers, Ardennes, France—died March 5, 1893, Paris), French thinker, critic, and historian. Taine came to believe as a youth that knowledge must be based on sense experience, observation, and controlled experiment, a conviction that guided his career. Teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1864–83), he earned a reputation as one of the most esteemed exponents of 19th-century French positivism with his attempts to apply the scientific method to the study of the humanities. His works include a History of English Literature (1863–64), containing an explanation of his approach to cultural and literary history and his scientific attitude toward criticism; On Intelligence (1871), a study in psychology; and his monumental historical analysis Les Origines de la France contemporaine, 3 vol. (1876–99).

positivism Summary

Positivism, in Western philosophy, generally, any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations. More narrowly, the term designates the thought of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). As a philosophical ideology and movement,

Jean de La Fontaine, oil painting by François De Troy; in the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Geneva

Jean de La Fontaine Summary

Jean de La Fontaine was a poet whose Fables rank among the greatest masterpieces of French literature. La Fontaine was born in the Champagne region into a bourgeois family. There, in 1647, he married an heiress, Marie Héricart, but they separated in 1658. From 1652 to 1671 he held office as an

Livy Summary

Livy was, with Sallust and Tacitus, one of the three great Roman historians. His history of Rome became a classic in his own lifetime and exercised a profound influence on the style and philosophy of historical writing down to the 18th century. Little is known about Livy’s life and nothing about

philosophy of history Summary

Philosophy of history, the study either of the historical process and its development or of the methods used by historians to understand their material. The term history may be employed in two quite different senses: it may mean (1) the events and actions that together make up the human past, or