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Meliorism
Meliorism (Latin ''melior'', better) is the idea that progress is a real concept leading to an improvement of the world. It holds that humans can, through their interference with processes that would otherwise be natural, produce an outcome which is an improvement over the aforementioned natural one. Meliorism, as a conception of the person and society, is at the foundation of contemporary liberal democracy and human rights and is a basic component of liberalism. Another important understanding of the meliorist tradition comes from the American Pragmatic tradition. One can read about it in the works of Lester Frank Ward, William James, and John Dewey. In James' works, however, meliorism does not pinpoint to progressivism and/or optimism. For James, meliorism stands in the middle between optimism and pessimism, and treats the salvation of the world as a probability rather than a certainty or impossibility. In the case of a meliorist praxis, the activist contemporary of the Pragm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lester Frank Ward
Lester Frank Ward (June 18, 1841 – April 18, 1913) was an American botanist, paleontologist, and sociologist. He served as the first president of the American Sociological Association. In service of democratic development, polymath Lester Ward was the original American leader promoting the introduction of sociology courses into American higher education. His Enlightenment belief that institution-building could be scientifically informed was attractive to democratic intellectuals during the Progressive Era. To avoid anachronism and misinterpretation, it is crucial to understand that what "scientific" means, including scientists' own science concept, has long been contested. Ward's version of social science was based in organicist Enlightenment theories of comparative knowledge for democratic development, as distinguished from the mechanist version of science associated with Spencer's version of Sociology, and which later came to dominate the Anglo-American sciences and, along ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |