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Chronological Snobbery
Chronological snobbery is an argument that the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier periods were less intelligent. The term was coined by C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield, and first mentioned by Lewis in his 1955 autobiographical work, '' Surprised by Joy''. Chronological snobbery is a form of appeal to novelty. Explanation As Barfield explains it, it is the belief that "intellectually, humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century." The subject came up between them when Barfield had converted to Anthroposophy and was seeking to get Lewis (an atheist at the time) to join him. One of Lewis's objections was that religion was simply outdated, and in '' Surprised by Joy'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Serial-position Effect
Serial-position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst. The term was coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus through studies he performed on himself, and refers to the finding that recall accuracy varies as a function of an item's position within a study list. When asked to recall a list of items in any order (free recall), people tend to begin recall with the end of the list, recalling those items best (the recency effect). Among earlier list items, the first few items are recalled more frequently than the middle items (the primacy effect). One suggested reason for the primacy effect is that the initial items presented are most effectively stored in long-term memory because of the greater amount of processing devoted to them. (The first list item can be rehearsed by itself; the second must be rehearsed along with the first, the third along with the first and second, and so on.) The primacy effect is reduced when item ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Owen Barfield
Arthur Owen Barfield (9 November 1898 – 14 December 1997) was a British philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings. Life Barfield was born in London, to Elizabeth (née Shoults; 1860–1940) and Arthur Edward Barfield (1864–1938). He had three elder siblings: Diana (1891–1963), Barbara (1892–1951), and Harry (1895–1977). He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a first class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became his third book ''Poetic Diction'', he was a dedicated poet and author for over ten years. After 1934 his profession was as a solicitor in London, from which he retired in 1959 aged 60. Thereafter he had many guest appointments as Visiting Professor in North America. Barfield published numerous essays, books, and articles. His primary focus was on what he called the "evolution of consciousness," which is an idea which occurs frequently in his writings. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Surprised By Joy
''Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life'' is a partial autobiography published by C. S. Lewis in 1955. The work describes Lewis's life from very early childhood (born 1898) until his conversion to Christianity in 1931, but does not go beyond that date. Overview Lewis' purpose in writing was not primarily historical. His aim was instead to identify and describe the events surrounding his accidental discovery of and consequent search for the phenomenon he labeled "Joy", his best translation of the idea of ''Sehnsucht'' (german: longing). This ''Joy'' was so intense for something so good and so high up it could not be explained with words. He is struck with "stabs of joy" throughout his life. "Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing." Overall, the book contains less detail concerning specific events than a typical autobiography, although it is not devoid of information ab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Appeal To Novelty
The appeal to novelty (also called appeal to modernity or ''argumentum ad novitatem'') is a fallacy in which one prematurely claims that an idea or proposal is correct or superior, ''exclusively'' because it is new and modern. In a controversy between status quo and new inventions, an appeal to novelty argument is not in itself a valid argument. The fallacy may take two forms: overestimating the new and modern, prematurely and without investigation assuming it to be best-case, or underestimating status quo, prematurely and without investigation assuming it to be worst-case. Investigation may prove these claims to be true, but it is a fallacy to prematurely conclude this ''only from the general claim that all novelty is good''. Chronological snobbery is a form of appeal to novelty, in which one argues that the only relevant knowledge and practices are those established in the last decades. The opposite of an appeal to novelty is an appeal to tradition, in which one argues that the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthroposophy
Anthroposophy is a spiritualist movement founded in the early 20th century by the esotericist Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world, accessible to human experience. Followers of anthroposophy aim to engage in spiritual discovery through a mode of thought independent of sensory experience. While much of anthroposophy is pseudoscientific, proponents claim to present their ideas in a manner that is verifiable by rational discourse and say that they seek precision and clarity comparable to that obtained by scientists investigating the physical world. Anthroposophy has its roots in German idealism, mystical philosophies, and pseudoscience including racist pseudoscience. Steiner chose the term ''anthroposophy'' (from Greek , 'human', and '' sophia'', 'wisdom') to emphasize his philosophy's humanistic orientation. He defined it as "a scientific exploration of the spiritual world", Others have variously called it a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atheist
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists. The first individuals to identify themselves as atheists lived in the 18th century during the Age of Enlightenment. The French Revolution, noted for its "unprecedented atheism", witnessed the first significant political movement in history to advocate for the supremacy of human reason.Extract of page 22 In 1967, Albania declared itself the first official atheist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Declinism
Declinism is the belief that a society or institution is tending towards decline. Particularly, it is the predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy retrospection, to view the past more favourably and the future more negatively. "The great summit of declinism," according to Adam Gopnick, "was established in 1918, in the book that gave decline its good name in publishing: the German historian Oswald Spengler's best-selling, thousand-page work ''The Decline of the West''." History The belief has been traced back to Edward Gibbon's work ''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', published between 1776 and 1788, which argues that the Roman Empire collapsed because of the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens, who became lazy, spoiled and inclined to hire foreign mercenaries to handle the defence of state. He believed that reason must triumph over superstition to save Europe's great powers from a similar fate to the Roman Empire. Spengler's bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Genetic Fallacy
The genetic fallacy (also known as the fallacy of origins or fallacy of virtue) is a fallacy of irrelevance in which arguments or information are dismissed or validated based solely on their source of origin rather than their content. In other words, a claim is ignored or given credibility based on its source rather than the claim itself. The fallacy therefore fails to assess the claim on its merit. The first criterion of a good argument is that the premises must have bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim in question. Genetic accounts of an issue may be true, and they may help illuminate the reasons why the issue has assumed its present form, but they are not conclusive in determining its merits. In '' The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'' (1995) it is asserted that the term originated in Morris Raphael Cohen and Ernest Nagel's book ''Logic and Scientific Method'' (1934). However, in a book review published in ''The Nation'' in 1926, Mortimer J. Adler complained that ''The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historian's Fallacy
The historian's fallacy is an informal fallacy that occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision. It is not to be confused with presentism, a similar but distinct mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas (such as moral standards) are projected into the past. The idea was first articulated by British literary critic Matthew Arnold in 1880 and later named and defined by American historian David Hackett Fischer in 1970. Concept The idea that a critic can make erroneous interpretations of past works because of knowledge of subsequent events was first articulated by Matthew Arnold. In his 1880 essay ''The Study of Poetry,'' he wrote: The course of development of a nation’s language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet’s work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Myth Of Progress
Progress is the movement towards a refined, improved, or otherwise desired state. In the context of progressivism, it refers to the proposition that advancements in technology, science, and social organization have resulted, and by extension will continue to result, in an improved human condition; the latter may happen as a result of direct human action, as in social enterprise or through activism, or as a natural part of sociocultural evolution. The concept of progress was introduced in the early-19th-century social theories, especially social evolution as described by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. It was present in the Enlightenment's philosophies of history. As a goal, social progress has been advocated by varying realms of political ideologies with different theories on how it is to be achieved. Measuring progress Specific indicators for measuring progress can range from economic data, technical innovations, change in the political or legal system, and questions bea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Presentism (literary And Historical Analysis)
In literary and historical analysis, presentism is the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common fallacy when writing about the past. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' gives the first citation for ''presentism'' in its historiographic sense from 1916, and the word may have been used in this meaning as early as the 1870s. The historian David Hackett Fischer identifies presentism as a fallacy also known as the "fallacy of '' nunc pro tunc''". He has written that the "classic example" of presentism was the so-called "Whig history", in which certain 18th- and 19th-century British historians wrote history in a way that used the past to validate their own political beliefs. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Whig History
Whig history (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present". The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy: it was originally a satirical term for the patriotic grand narratives praising Britain's adoption of constitutional monarchy and the historical development of the Westminster system. The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (e.g. in the history of science) to describe "any subjection of history to what is essentially a teleological view of the historical process". When the term is used in contexts other than British history, "whig history" (lowercase) is preferred. In the British context, whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress. The term is often applied generally (and pejoratively) to histor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
