Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) is credited with making sociology a science, as he used an empirical methodology eg. in his studies of suicide rates and issues of European nations. Sociological functionalism: all aspects of human society work together like the parts of a machine; societal organisation plays a major role in the lives of humans.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) French philosopher, psychologist and ethnologist. How Natives Think (1910, tr. 1926); Primitive Mentality (1922, tr. 1923); Primitives and the Supernatural (1931, tr. 1935).
Lévy-Bruhl challenged the evolutionary assumption - Western civilisations representing the height of reasoning, etc.. But by the end of his life Anthropology had changed so much that his ideas already seemed reactionary. L L-B proposed that the ``primitive mind'' follows a ``pre-logic'' which is to be understood on its own terms. This mind is dominated by emotion and affect, little concerned with logic and tolerant of contradictions and mystical forces. In later life however L-B thought that the ``primitive mentality'' was common to all humans but seen in the foreground only in pre-literate people - in Western society it was superceded by scientific thought.