This article highlights Comte's ambivalence toward the sciences, which he otherwise celebrated as the foundation of positivism. It correlates changes in his attitude with his personal expériences as an ambitious scholar unable to find acceptance and legitimacy in the leading institutions of his time, especially the Académie des sciences. Comte remained a scientific bohemian, unable to adapt to the new trends of professionalization but eager to impose his moral vision on the scientific community that rejected him. Cet article (...) souligne l'ambivalence de Comte envers les sciences, qu'il a par ailleurs déclarées bases du positivisme. Il s'agit de mettre en relation ses changements d'attitude avec ses expériences personnelles, plus particulièrement avec son échec à se faire accepter et légitimer par les grandes institutions savantes de son temps, dont l'Académie des sciences. Comte est resté scientifiquement marginalisé, peu apte à s'adapter aux nouvelles exigences de la professionnalisation, mais très soucieux d'imposer ses conceptions morales à la société scientifique qui l'a rejeté. (shrink)

Understanding physicians as actors who implemented the early modern ideal of collective empiricism into their practices within the local contexts of everyday life, the paper explores two cases from imperial cities in southern Germany in the 1720s and 1780s in which anatomical studies were contested. By analyzing the strategies and arguments that the two physicians used to justify and continue their anatomical dissections, it focuses on their references to different kinds of (local) community and relates these references to another type (...) of collective: membership in a scientific academy. To examine references to community, it is proposed, offers an opportunity to better understand the spread and practice of the ideal of the study of nature as a collective project and how it was intertwined with concepts and structures of order and society in the Holy Roman Empire. (shrink)