Positivism

This thesis explores ways in which the mid-nineteenth-century current of positivist thought impacted upon the work of the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Guided by certain methodological imperatives set out in the theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra – in par…

Witnessing the wide-reaching repercussions of the French and Industrial Revolutions, Auguste Comte and his British followers organised a concerted effort to answer 'the question of modern times,' the 'incorporation of the proletariat into modern society'. This dissertation prese…

This PhD thesis utilises diagrams as a language for research and design practice to critically investigate algorithmic prediction. As a tool for practice-based research, the language of diagrams is presented as a way to read algorithmic prediction as a set of intricate computati…

How did opera, Italy’s national art form, crystallize the intellectual and cultural reforms of the post-Unification era? Examining this question through the lens of the positivist movement in Italy, I articulate the ways that scientific practices from the 1880s through the mid-1…

For his central role in formulating modern positivist philosophy, scholars have rightfully inducted Auguste Comte into the overwhelmingly male pantheon of nineteenth-century intellectuals. Conspicuously absent from the purview of scholarship, however, has been any reasonable exa…