As is well known, the founding theoretician of positivism, Auguste Comte, forbade that any further attention be paid by philosophy to unanswerable questions—the very ones that the philosophical age just before Comte’s (the very era he saw as now coming to an end) had so often posed. Henceforth, in this new era of the sciences, only questions that could be answered by those sciences were permissible. It is astonishing to realize to what extent this program is still being pursued