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Ever since Plato’s Phaedrus 245a; Herodotus’ (485-425BC) musings of the river Nile’s topology; and Eratosthenes (276-194 BC) rudimentary geodesy, geography was an ideographic science wherein its knowledge was gathered descriptively. As advancements in the scientific method were made during the enlightenment period, the iconoclast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte (1798–1857) recognised that this ideographic doctrine was too passé, speculative and romantic for being able to aptly describe the social science at a time when the scientific method was being influenced by a pensive reductionist zeitgeist. He transferred the empiricism assented in the scientific method to the social science so that it too could become nomothetic in nature. This established the philosophy known as ‘positivism,’ and this essay discusses its origin, criticisms and practises in human geography.

While Comte believed empiricism had recourse to positivism, this belief had no traction among a coterie of Hegelians advocating interpretivism, as they believed that the laws ascribed to the natural sciences were too reductionist to be able to describe the social sciences within which geography, thanks to William M. Davis’s (1850-1934) Davisian geomorphology, was soon to become a subject in its own right. This prompted the hermeneutist Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) separating of the social and natural science, and Émile Durkheim’s (1858-1917) establishing of the social science as an academic discipline itself set forth three evolutionary stages of geography.

The first was the environmental determinism indirectly alluded to by Herodotus. The second was the ideographic regional geography that Richard Hartshorne (1899-1992) accredited in his book The Nature of Geography, which elicited Fredrick Schaefer (1904-1953) truculent criticism in his paper ‘Exceptionalism in Geography,’ in which he reviled Hartshorne’s areal differentiation, as Schaefer too was an iconoclast like Comte but in human geography. His inferring that geography has to be conceived as the science concerned with the formulation of the laws governing the spatial distribution of certain features on the surface of the Earth (Schaefer, 1953) ignited the third stage of geography: the quantitative revolution, which drew upon a penchant for deductive, inductive, and abductive logic.

Wilhelm Dilthey's separating... Should this be Wilhelm Dilthey's separation of ...

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