The willful irrationalism of climate denialism is now the default epistemological setting on the right.
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My gut reaction is that these student mobbists manage to combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism into one perfectly poisonous cocktail.
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But if the last year has taught us anything, it's that predictions are futile in the face of resurgent irrationalism and illiberalism.
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And not the cartoonish economic nationalism defined by the national media as a tariff war against the world, blended with protectionist policies, and all justified by some xenophobic, reactionary irrationalism to put America first.
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The publications as objects, which, though perhaps the most tangible legacy of their work, made up only a small part of the Dada practice, don't actually offer much insight into their creative process, where aesthetics were secondary to purposeful irrationalism.
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The corollary to Edmund Burke's famous words that the only prerequisite for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing is that the prerequisite for irrationalism to prevail is for generally rational people to cave in to it, and to tailor their messages to the worst of the visceral rage out there.
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In the speech, Obama offered high-minded reasons to not simply emulate the GOP's politics of irrationalism, but the more ground-level reality is that Democrats' more diverse coalition simply can't be mobilized with simplistic appeals to group threat in the same way because its various members do not necessarily share a clear social identity.
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As a quasi-political advocacy organization, it's devoted to exposing hypocrisy and what it deems to be irrationalism and cultic group behavior in all its forms, from the Christian right to "sham" mental health practitioners who, as during the Satanic panic, use "recovered memories" to convince patients they have suffered childhood sexual or spiritual abuse at the hands of imaginary cults.
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Schopenhauer: a Biography. Cambridge University Press. p. 4 Other common terms used to describe his thought were voluntarism and irrationalism which he also never used.
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Oxford: Pergamon Press. Archived from the original on 2015-02-02. Reprinted as Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism (1998). Macleay Press. .
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György Lukács believed that the first period of irrationalism arose with Schelling and Kierkegaard, in a fight against the dialectical concept of progress embraced by German idealism.
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This order calms the chaos in time; the viewer is rewarded for spending time with his canvases as hidden objects reveal themselves in an endless tension between rationalism and irrationalism.
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Irrationalism is a philosophical movement that emerged in the early 19th century, emphasizing the non-rational dimension of human life. As they reject logic, irrationalists argue that instinct and feelings are superior to the reason in the research of knowledge. Ontological irrationalism, a position adopted by Arthur Schopenhauer, describes the world as not organized in a rational way. Since humans are born as bodies-manifestations of an irrational striving for meaning, they are vulnerable to pain and suffering.
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Aside from naturalism,Hałas (2010), p. 21. Znaniecki was critical of a number of then-prevalent philosophical viewpoints: intellectualism,Hałas (2010), p. 52. idealism, realism, and rationalism. He was also critical of irrationalism and intuitionism.
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Frame, developing the thought of his mentor Cornelius Van Til, has asserted in both his Apologetics to the Glory of God and his Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought, that all non-Christian thought can be categorized as the ebb and flow of rationalism and irrationalism.
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The major political theme of the era was that of revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and liberal democracy. The fin-de-siècle generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism, while the mindset of the age saw civilization as being in a crisis that required a massive and total solution.
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A symmetrical facade crowned with an arched attic, is decorated in the Mordern style with elements of сlassitism and irrationalism. The first floor is decorated with banded rustication. The second and third floors have large windows and balconies with delicate iron-cast railing. The cornice is crowned with parapet established between decorative pedestals.
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Rabies has been the main plot device or a significant theme in many fictional works. Due to the long history of the virus as well as its neurotropic nature, rabies has been a potent symbol of madness, irrationalism, or an unstoppable plague in numerous fictional works, in many genres. Many notable examples are listed below.
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The novella, in its scope of characters, is a study of the relations between pessimism, irrationalism, and fiction. These theories are embodied, respectively, in the novella’s characters: Teodoro Golfín, Pablo, and Nela. The story contrasts their psychological analysis with a detailed description of nature, as an examination of the complexity of the world and its beauty.
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Kaminer, a former Guggenheim fellow, has published seven books in addition to Worst Instincts, including her landmark 1992 critique of self-help and the recovery movement, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self- Help Fashions. She has also written extensively about irrationalism, spiritualism, and the intersection of religion and politics in America, the subject of her 1999 book, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety. Her feminist writings include her 1990 book, A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight from Equality, reviewing the historic conflict between equality and protectionism for women and exploring the legal and social pitfalls of protectionism. A former legal aid attorney, she is a staunch critic of the death penalty and the criminal justice system, the subject of It's all the Rage: Crime and Culture.
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Irrationalism and aestheticism were themes in Howard's work. His philosophies were in line with the Romantic and Neo-Romantic eras. While he held many philosophical positions in his life, they all shared a rebellion against reason, against tradition, and against tyranny in any from. Howard's poetry was traditional and Romantic in form; which was against the trend of poetic tastes during his lifetime.
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Wendy Kaminer (born December 28, 1949) is an American lawyer and writer. She has written several books on contemporary social issues, including A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight From Equality, about the conflict between egalitarian and protectionist feminism; I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions, about the self-help movement; and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety.
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Kuhn's normal science is characterized by upheaval over cycles of puzzle-solving and scientific revolution, as opposed to cumulative improvement. In Kuhn's historicism, moving from one paradigm to the next completely changes the universe of scientific assumptions. Imre Lakatos has accused Kuhn of falling back on irrationalism to explain scientific progress. Lakatos relates Kuhnian scientific change to a mystical or religious conversion ungoverned by reason.
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Hegel- influenced Marxist thinkers, especially György Lukács and the Frankfurt School, associated the style and content of Heidegger's thought with German irrationalism and criticised its political implications.Rockmore, T., On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 57, 75, 149, 258. Initially members of the Frankfurt School were positively disposed to Heidegger, becoming more critical at the beginning of the 1930s.
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He also shared an office with fellow philosopher Imre Lakatos while he was in London. His form of Rationalism is subject, he admits, to circularity; but, he insists, it is better (even if only slightly better) than Poppers' Rationalism, which admits to irrationalism. However, his form of scientific realism is much stronger. His position does not assert that science is correct, only that we may reasonably accept certain parts of it to be correct.
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Sorel had been politically monarchist and traditionalist before embracing orthodox Marxism in the 1890s. He attempted to fill in what he believed were gaps in Marxist theory, resulting in an extremely heterodox and idiosyncratic view of Marxism. For instance, Sorel saw pessimism and irrationalism at the core of Marxism and rejected Karl Marx's own rationalism and "utopian" tendency. Sorel also saw Marxism as closer in spirit to early Christianity than to the French Revolution.
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René Wellek said that Bousoño was his preferred theorist in all of Europe. Spanish author and critic Luis Antonio de Villena called Bousoño "one of the most outstanding poets of the postwar generations" and "an outstanding poetry theorist, upholding the most profound sense of irrationalism and surrealism, that is, that the magic of the irrational can be understood". German-born poet Scharlie Meeuws wrote an 'Elegy on the Death of Carlos Bousoño'.
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He was a pacifist and a tough critic of all forms of racism. As a “radical atheist”, “he believed that religious faith was a manifestation of irrationalism” and “saw no way to reconcile religion with science”. However, following the view of Kotarbiński, he believed that atheism should be distinguished as part of the worldview from “godlessness, or mocking religion, or eliminating it by force”, and was “as far as possible from imposing a secular worldview on other people”.
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Neo-creationists have yet to establish a recognized line of legitimate scientific research and lack scientific and academic legitimacy, even among many academics of evangelical Christian colleges. Eugenie C. Scott and other critics regard neo-creationism as the most successful form of irrationalism. The main form of neo-creationism is intelligent design. A second form, abrupt appearance theory, which claims that the first life and the universe appeared abruptly and that plants and animals appeared abruptly in complex form, has occasionally been postulated.
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Yet Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations of the protest movement which would have only strengthened the conservative thesis according to which political irrationalism was the result of Adorno's teaching. After further disruptions to his lectures, Adorno canceled the lectures for the rest of the seminar, continuing only with his philosophy seminar. In the summer of 1969, weary from these activities, Adorno returned once again to Zermatt, Switzerland, at the foot of Matterhorn to restore his strength. On August 6 he died of a heart attack.
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Karl Marx in 1861 In his early works,See his The German Ideology (1844), The Poverty of Philosophy (1845), and The Holy Family (1847). Karl Marx criticized German and French philosophy, especially German Idealism, for its traditions of German irrationalism and ideologically motivated obscurantism.See, Dallmayr, Fred R., "The Discourse of Modernity: Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger (and Habermas)", PRAXIS International (4/1988), pp. 377–404. Later thinkers whom he influenced, such as the philosopher György Lukács and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, followed with similar arguments of their own.
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In 1953, sociologist Theodor W. Adorno conducted a study of the astrology column of a Los Angeles newspaper as part of a project that examined mass culture in capitalist society. Adorno believed that popular astrology, as a device, invariably led to statements that encouraged conformity—and that astrologers who went against conformity with statements that discouraged performance at work etc. risked losing their jobs. Adorno concluded that astrology was a large-scale manifestation of systematic irrationalism, where flattery and vague generalisations subtly led individuals to believe the author of the column addressed them directly.
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Ritter's biography of Frederick, published in 1936, was designed as a challenge to Nazi claims that there was a continuity between Frederick and Hitler. Dorpalen says: "The book was indeed a very courageous indictment of Hitler's irrationalism and recklessness, his ideological fanaticism and insatiable lust for power". Throughout World War II, Hitler often compared himself to Frederick the Great. British-American historian Gordon A. Craig relates that to help legitimize Nazi rule Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels commissioned artists to render fanciful images of Frederick, Bismarck, and Hitler together to postulate a historical continuum between them.
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He began to doubt everything, and in 1928 joined the Communist Party of Austria: > As if struck by a blow, one suddenly recognizes the scientific futility, the > biological senselessness, and the social noxiousness of views and > institutions, which until that moment had seemed altogether natural and > self-evident. It is a kind of eschatological experience so frequently > encountered in a pathological form in schizophrenics. I might even voice the > belief that the schizophrenic form of psychic illness is regularly > accompanied by illuminating insight into the irrationalism of social and > political mores.Turner 2011, p.
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Explicit concerns of Schelling in the book are: the existence of evil and the emergence into reason. Schelling offers a solution to the first, an old theological chestnut, in brief that “evil makes arbitrary choice possible”. On the other hand, by no means all interpretations of the work come from the direction of theology and the problem of evil. The second idea, requiring a rationale of emergence, was more innovative, because of the place it gave to irrationalism and anthropomorphism, within the "cosmic" setting (which need not be taken literally).
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Europe was then undergoing unprecedented technological progress and social upheaval. The rapid industrialisation and the accompanying urbanisation were breaking down many of the traditional structures of society. Nordau's views were in many ways more like those of an 18th-century thinker, a belief in Reason, Progress and more traditional, classical rules governing art and literature. The irrationalism and amorality of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and the flagrant anti-Semitism of Richard Wagner were seen as proof to Nordau that society was in danger of returning to an era before the Enlightenment.
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This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science. #"Disagreement Is Treason" – Fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith. #"Fear of Difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants. #"Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
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Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder is a collection of essays in the history of philosophy by 20th century philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin. Edited by Henry Hardy and released posthumously in 2000, the collection comprises the previously published works Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (1976) – an essay on Counter-Enlightenment thinkers Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder – and The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (1993), concerning irrationalist Johann Georg Hamann.
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According to literary historian Adrian Marino, it should be read as a "nihilistic" text, echoing the irrationalism of Dada and Futurism.Adrian Marino, "Tendances esthétiques", in Jean Weisgerber (ed.), Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle II, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam & Philadelphia, 1986, pp. 671-672\. In March, he contributed the Contimporanul editorial, a polemical text about the impact of cultural modernity. Researcher Paul Cernat sees in it a sample of "rather Futurist" Orthodoxism, noting its attack on the "supersexual" content and "gallantry" of minor modernism, as well as its praise of purity in high modernism.
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Webb's theories of Gurdjieff's identity as a Russian foreign agent in Central Asia,Gary Lachman, "Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen", 2008, Quest Books, pp124-125. and theories on where he actually travelled before 1917, are considered controversial points in The Harmonious Circle. Webb's work challenges theories of secularism, theories of decline in organised religion and spirituality. Webb argued that the 19th and 20th centuries had also been marked by a revolt against the Enlightenment, and that the rise of irrationalism was much more marked than the rise of rationalism, especially before, during and after the First World War and the Second World War.
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Literature professors involved in deconstructionism promote irrationalism and skepticism of standards of truth and thereby dissolve the moral imperatives which are communicated through genuine philosophy and which elevate and broaden the intellects of those who engage with these imperatives. To a great extent, Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. He draws analogies between the United States and the Weimar Republic. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the Enlightenment thought of John Locke—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.
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Dostoyevsky's works were often called "philosophical", although he described himself as "weak in philosophy".Anna Dostoyevskaya, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii F. M. Dostoevskogo, St. Petersburg, 1882–83, 1:225 According to Strakhov, "Fyodor Mikhailovich loved these questions about the essence of things and the limits of knowledge". His close friend, the philosopher and theologian Vladimir Solovyov, felt that he was "more a sage and an artist than a strictly logical, consistent thinker."Vladimir Solovyov, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov'eva, St. Petersburg, Obshchestvennaia Pol'za, 1901–07, 5:382 His irrationalism is mentioned in William Barrett's Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy and in Walter Kaufmann's Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.
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If they dismissed communism as mere idealism, many thinkers showed their dependence on Marxist terminology in their writings. Jung emphasized the "historical inevitability" of conservatism taking over from the liberal era, in a mirror-image of the historical materialism developed by Karl Marx. If Splenger also wrote about the decline of the West as an ineluctable phenomenon, his intention was to provide modern readers with a "new socialism" that would enable them to realize the meaninglessness of life, contrasting with Marx's idea of the coming of paradise on earth. Above all, the Conservative Revolution drew influences from vitalism and irrationalism, rather than from materialism.
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Stanley Payne maintains it's their vague and confusing ideas, (PAYNE, Stanley (1965) Sobre Falange Española. París: Ruedo Ibérico), while S. Ellwood believes Nationalism, Imperialism and Irrationalism to characterise their ideas, as stated in Prietas las filas. Historia de la Falange Española, 1933-1985. Grijalbo (found at ) Although these mottos originated from the activity of different right-wing intellectuals and nationalist political parties during the Second Spanish Republic, their use became widespread and proved to be an effective propaganda tool used by the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) in mobilising public opinion and persuading the population to conform to nationalist ideas.
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Under George's influence, Kommerell adopted a position of elitist disdain for democracy and support for irrationalism and German nationalism, becoming identified with the Conservative Revolutionary movement. In 1928, Kommerell published a programmatic work, Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik ("The Poet as Leader in German Classicism"), embodying the views he had received from George. The critical theorist Walter Benjamin reviewed the book in 1930 in an article titled "Wider ein Meisterwerk" ("Against a Masterpiece"). Though he described the work as "amazing" and betokening an "extraordinary precision and boldness of ... vision", Benjamin attacked Kommerell for what he saw as repetitive images of violence and service to a dangerous nationalist ideology.
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It can be concluded that Kuhn's idea of incommensurability, despite its various reformulations, manages to seriously problematize both the idea of accumulation of a neutral language as well as of the very idea of a neutral language, without falling into irrationalism nor stating that the common reference level is irrelevant. An idea that differentiates him from Feyerabend who states in books such as Problems of Empiricism and Against Method that if the new theory deviates into new areas, this is not a problem of the theory, as often the conceptual progress leads to the disappearance and not to the refutation or resolution of the old questions.
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"Now it seemed to me that in science ... even more than in the arts the great bulk of people ... were chasing a meal-ticket or social status rather than quenching any passionate search for knowledge. ... Within the rigours of their own disciplines, trendiness, deference to authority, purblind commitment to pet theories, however discredited, wilfulness, jealousy and One-up-manship were more noticeable than outsiders imagine. Outside their professional competence, they showed no greater resistance than non-scientists to mythology, ancient or modern ... and no less tendency to 'irrationalism' in everyday life. Even when their professional researches were models of objectivity and humility, these did not necessarily spill over into their private lives and influence their moral judgements".
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He uses this expression, since it is not always clear to him whether the writing expresses "equivocation" or "inconsistency". What is common to the examples Stove offers is that something well-known is mixed with something extraordinary, without the clash being resolved; the "irrationalism" is introduced simultaneously with orthodoxy, rendering it more plausible to the reader—disbelief is suspended. A straightforward example is provided by Thomas Kuhn's description of "paradigm shift", where he asserts the well-known fact that the world is the same after "paradigm shift" as before. Yet, at the same time, Kuhn also suggests that solutions to problems achieved under old paradigms are lost, redundant or "un- solutions" under new paradigms—denial of (A) above.
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The signatories said they "reject fear of modernity, fear of freedom, irrationalism, the subordination of women", and > reaffirm the ideas that inspired the great rallying calls of the democratic > revolutions of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality and solidarity; > human rights; the pursuit of happiness ... But we are not zealots. For we > embrace also the values of free enquiry, open dialogue and creative doubt, > of care in judgement and a sense of the intractabilities of the world. We > stand against all claims to a total — unquestionable or unquestioning — > truth. The Euston Manifesto was accused of supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, equating opposition to the state of Israel with antisemitism, and attempting to rally pro-imperialist sentiment among the Left.
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With a particular focus on Malaysia, the thesis of the book is that growing Islamisation of the political and social climate in Islamic countries are causing democracy and freedom to be threatened by religious irrationalism. He attempts to show how the curtailing of democracy and freedom of speech have caused those countries to collapse. He further draws a distinction between Islam and its current practises, and offers his perspective that current practises of Muslims are not in vein with the true meaning of Islam with that being the underlying cause for the collapse of those countries. The book takes pains to stress that many practises that define Islam on the world stage like stringent laws, cruel punishments and irrational beliefs cannot be found in the Quran.
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Arthur Green (born 1941) is one of the original Hairy Who members from Chicago, a group of students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited together in the 1960s and 1970s and turned to representational art with a slight surrealist touch. He was also a member of the University of Waterloo's faculty for over 30 years. His painting style mixes pop-art motifs with surrealist tendencies, creating a contained tension between order and chaos, rationalism and irrationalism. His upbringing in Chicago and its vicinity surely influenced him, from the accessibility to masterpieces at the Art Institute of Chicago to the grand architecture of Louis Sullivan, but also advertisements from the 1940s and 1950s that oozed with undertones of sexuality.
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Non-Christian thought, in Frame's view, also is characterized by irrationalism because inevitably the finite and fallen human mind cannot fully capture all of reality into a man-made system. On this position, at the point in which the non-Christian rationalist realizes that they cannot account for everything, they engage in what Francis Schaeffer called an "upper story leap." As a brief example, Frame uses the epistemology of Kant, who taught that the categories of thought that are necessary for our understanding the world around us, such as causality, logic, time, space, and order, are structured by our minds and imposed upon the things we experience. In order to be rational and make sense out of life we must assume, or presuppose, these notions.
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By the time of World War II, Mircea Florian was still pursuing a debate with the two schools of irrationalism, promoted by Lucian Blaga and Constantin Noica. Granted a full professorship in 1940, he was presented for Romanian Academy membership by his mentor Rădulescu-Motru, but the proposal failed to gather support. Blaga gave poor reviews to his work in Saeculum magazine, and, in one (disputed) interpretation, may have portrayed him as the unknown adversary in the virulent lampoon Săpunul filozofic ("Philosophic Soap", 1943). Florian Roatiș, "Despre polemica Blaga-Motru", in România Literară, Nr. 4/2009 According to literary historian Z. Ornea, Florian's relative lack of exposure is unfair, since his works may rank better than those of either Noica or Blaga.
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Interview with Kenan Malik from 17 November 2016 in which he speaks about diversity and identity Malik has long campaigned for equal rights, freedom of expression, and a secular society, and in defence of rationalism and humanism in the face of what he has called "a growing culture of irrationalism, mysticism and misanthropy". In the 1980s, he was associated with a number of Marxist organisations, including the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), and Big Flame. He stood as the RCP's candidate in Birmingham Selly Oak in the general election in 1992, coming last out of six candidates with 84 votes (0.15%). He was also involved with anti-racist campaigns, including the Anti-Nazi League and East London Workers Against Racism.
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Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called 'relativists' are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.'Richard Rorty, Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism :'In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try.'Rorty, R. Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace Rorty takes a deflationary attitude to truth, believing there is nothing of interest to be said about truth in general, including the contention that it is generally subjective.
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Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, was the first to use the phrase in 1946. He later gave a descriptive explanation: Nehru wrote that the scientific temper goes beyond the domains to which science is conventionally understood to be limited to, and deals also with the consideration of ultimate purposes, beauty, goodness and truth. He contended that the scientific temper is the opposite of the method of religion, which relies on emotion and intuition and is (mis)applied "to everything in life, even to those things which are capable of intellectual inquiry and observation." While religion tends to close the mind and produce "intolerance, credulity and superstition, emotionalism and irrationalism", and "a temper of a dependent, unfree person", a scientific temper "is the temper of a free man".
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However, he rejected the view that we need to abandon the Western tradition of scientific rationalism, and was unsympathetic towards attempts to articulate environmental concern through radical revisions of our ethical framework, as advocated by deep ecologists, which he conceived as misguided mysticism or irrationalism. Passmore was very skeptical about attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature, and his preferred position was of valuing nature in terms of what it contributes to the flourishing of sentient creatures (including humans). According to William Grey of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, his "unequivocal anthropocentrism made him a reference point in the discourse of environmental ethics and many treatises in field begin with (or include) a refutation of his views". Passmore described himself as a "pessimistic humanist" who regarded neither human beings nor human societies as perfectible.
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New Atheism is a term coined by the journalist Gary Wolf in 2006 to describe the positions promoted by some atheists of the twenty-first century.Lois Lee & Stephen Bullivant, A Dictionary of Atheism (Oxford University Press, 2016).Wolff, Gary, in The New Atheism, The Church of the Non-Believers reprinted in Wired Magazine, November 2006 This modern-day atheism is advanced by a group of thinkers and writers who advocate the view that superstition, religion and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever their influence arises in government, education, and politics. New Atheism lends itself to, and often overlaps with, secular humanism and antitheism—most particularly, in its criticism of what many New Atheists regard as the indoctrination of children and the perpetuation of ideologies founded on belief in the supernatural.
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In later years, most notably in The Faith of a Moralist, Taylor began to move away from certain doctrines of his early idealistic youth, towards a more mature and comprehensive idealist philosophy. While students at Oxford and Cambridge were in thrall of anti- idealism, Taylor for many years influenced generations of young people at the University of St. Andrews (1908–1924) and the University of Edinburgh (1924–1941), two of the most ancient and prestigious universities of the United Kingdom, where he was Professor of Moral Philosophy. As a philosophical scholar he is considered, alongside Francis Macdonald Cornford, one of the greatest English Platonists of his time. In the first half of the 20th century, Taylor remained, in a reactionary age of anti-metaphysics and growing political irrationalism, a lonely but stalwart defender of 19th century European philosophical idealism in the English-speaking world.
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A store on Piccadilly with its windows boarded up after being smashed by protesters There have been calls for boycott of Starbucks stores and products because it has been wrongly claimed that Starbucks sends part of its profits to the Israeli military, but such allegations are based on a hoax letter attributed to the President, Chairman, and CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, who is JewishDamian Thompson "The Starbucks conspiracy theory: how a coffee chain was libelled by anti-Zionists ", Daily Telegraph (blog), January 14, 2009 and supports Israel's right to exist.Brendan O'Neill "Israel, Starbucks and the new irrationalism", spiked.online, January 14, 2009 He is a recipient of several Israeli awards including "The Israel 50th Anniversary Tribute Award" for "playing a key role in promoting a close alliance between the United States and Israel". The hoax letter claiming that Schultz had donated money to the Israeli military was actually written by an Australian weblogger, Andrew Winkler, who has admitted fabricating the document.
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The root of this despair is what he frequently calls 'Necessity', but also 'Reason', 'Idealism' or 'Fate': a certain way of thinking (but at the same time also a very real aspect of the world) that subordinates life to ideas, abstractions, generalisations and thereby kills it, through an ignoring of the uniqueness and livingness of reality. 'Reason' is the obedience to and the acceptance of Certainties that tell us that certain things are eternal and unchangeable and other things are impossible and can never be attained. This accounts for Shestov's philosophy being a form of irrationalism, though it is important to note that the thinker does not oppose reason, or science in general, but only rationalism and scientism: the tendency to consider reason as a sort of omniscient, omnipotent God that is good for its own sake. It may also be considered a form of personalism: people cannot be reduced to ideas, social structures, or mystical oneness.
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In other words, says Said, irrationalism means to let one person think and decide for another—to let one person control others. Said refers to the media's ability to control and filter information as an 'invisible screen', releasing what it wants people to know and blacking out what it does not want them to know. In the age of information, Said argues, it is the media that interprets and filters information—and Said claims that the media has determined very selectively what Westerners should and should not know about Islam and the Muslim world. Islam is portrayed as oppressive (women in Hijab); outmoded (hanging, beheading and stoning to death); anti-intellectualist (book burning); restrictive (bans on post- and extramarital affairs, alcohol and gambling); extremist (focusing on Algeria, Lebanon and of course Egypt); backward (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Sudan); the cause of worldwide conflict (Palestine, Kashmir and Indonesia); and dangerous (Turkey and Iran).
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Dorpalen says, "The book was indeed a very courageous indictment of Hitler's irrationalism and recklessness, his ideological fanaticism and insatiable lust for power."Andreas Dorpalen, "Historiography as History: The Work of Gerhard Ritter." Journal of Modern History (1962) (March, 1962), p 9 Dorpalen nevertheless criticized Ritter's historiography as apologetic of Prussian militarism, German past and figures like Frederick the Great and BismarckGerman History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach By Andreas Dorpalen, Foreword by Georg Iggers page 14, 1985 Ritter's emphasis on Frederick's limited war aims and willingness to settle for less than he initially sought was seen at the time as a form of oblique criticism of Adolf Hitler. In addition, the emphasis that Ritter placed on the influence of the Enlightenment and "orderly reason" on Fredrick were intended by Ritter to quietly disprove Hitler's claim to be Frederick's successor.Schwabe, Klaus "Gerhard Ritter" pages 83-103 from Paths of Continuity Washington, D.C. : German Historical Institute, 1994 page 95.
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125 London Wall (1992) by Terry Farrell and Partners aimed to "repair the urban fabric" of the district, dominated by post-Blitz modernist schemes. The postmodernist movement is often seen (especially in the US) as an American movement, starting in America around the 1960s–1970s and then spreading to Europe and the rest of the world, to remain right through to the present. In 1966, however, the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner spoke of a revived Expressionism as being "a new style, successor to my International Modern of the 1930s, a post-modern style", and included as examples Le Corbusier's work at Ronchamp and Chandigarh, Denys Lasdun at the Royal College of Physicians in London, Richard Sheppard at Churchill College, Cambridge, and James Stirling's and James Gowan's Leicester Engineering Building, as well as Philip Johnson's own guest house at New Canaan, Connecticut. Pevsner disapproved of these buildings for their self-expression and irrationalism, but he acknowledged them as "the legitimate style of the 1950s and 1960s" and defined their characteristics.
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