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Positivism and Idealism Nightingale’s philosophy of science is clearly in the positivist tradition, understood as the acquisition of knowledge through research in the real world, as opposed to intuition, introspection or reliance on authority. Yet Nightingale in some of her writing made rude remarks about positivists and positivism, for their atheism or their espousal of a new ‘‘religion of humanity.’’ J.S. Mill was the ‘‘tenderest’’ of the positivists. More often she sought to integrate a methodologically tough positivism with idealism in objectives. In Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, objecting to an article which treated the two as ‘‘opposite philosophies,’’ she called the one ‘‘a necessary precursor and foundation of the other.’’ She asked: ‘‘Are not the two one? . . . [for] positivism lays down that all things, moral as well as physical, are subject to law.’’ Moreover, ‘‘is not positivism, rightly understood, the only way to idealism—the only way by which we can alter or improve anything?’’ She disagreed with the view that positivism led necessarily to the substitution of law for the idea of a personal God. Rather positivism provided idealists with the tools to learn where and how to intervene for good: A perfect God cannot change His mind. Positivism says the latter half of this, idealism the former half, that is, positivism says that universal law, or the mind of God, is never altered. Idealism says that He would not be a perfect God who could alter His mind and that we should expect to see God working as the only way a perfect Being could work by universal law.7 Consistent with her views on social science Nightingale supported the organizations that promoted it. For many years she sent papers to meetings of the British Association for the Promotion of Social Science , founded in 1857 with a strong applied emphasis. She submitted two papers on hospital construction to its first Social Science Congress in 1858 in Liverpool; one to Dublin in 1861 on hospital statistics; two to Edinburgh in 1863 on aboriginal races and Indian sanitation; one to York in 1864, again on aboriginal races; and one to Norwich in 1873 on Indian sanitation. Dr Farr proposed her for membership in the London Statistical Society (later the Royal Statistical Society) in 1858; she was its first woman member. As a British empiricist philosophically, Nightingale could be expected to have favourable views of John Locke (1632-1704) and Francis 7 Add Mss 45841 f23. Themes / 57 ...

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