Alasdair MacIntyre has said, with insight, that every discipline is an open debate about its own history. This is nowhere more so than in the case of sociology. Auguste Comte (1798-1857) is generally, but by no means universally, acknowledged as a kind of founding father of this discipline (in the eyes of some the main alternative candidate would be Émile Durkheim – even though he himself explicitly attributes this role to Comte). During his lifetime Comte came to be considered something of a maverick or even a madman by some of his former disciples. A consideration of Comte’s project and the reactions it produced from the beginning is one way of broaching the daunting task of defining the sociological paradigm alongside the other paradigms we have examined so far in this series. The place to begin is with history, in particular with that of the French Revolution, of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the restoration of the monarchy in 19th century France. To this we must add the, partially parallel, history of the second industrial revolution with its obvious dependence on the history of advances in science and technology. Without at least a general awareness of these circumstances, Comte’s project cannot…

In the second semester of 2024-2025 a group of professors and collaborators will offer a transdisciplinary course in the Alphonsian Academy entitled “La persona umana come essere relazionale. Prospettive transdisciplinari”. The course will be comprised of three parts: 1. Introduction 2. Selected Authors and Texts 3. Five Paradigms (personalist, phenomenological, psychological, sociological and theological). This is the second of a series of posts in which I will examine (in my own name, not in that of the research group) in a preliminary way each of these five paradigms…) II. The Personalist Paradigm In the first post of this series we examined how the meaning of the term “paradigm” has itself undergone significant “shifts”. From being a simple, identifiable pattern (as in a grammatical paradigm) a paradigm has come to refer to something like a comprehensive, prescriptive model for collective living (as in “the technocratic paradigm”). It is clear that such a move is potentially of enormous importance for ethics because it implies the moral evaluation of alternative, competing models of human interaction. In the planned transdisciplinary course, we will be examining five different paradigms of the human person as a relational being. Let us begin by taking an initial look…