How American virtue lost its identity: 1765–1980

2020 ◽  
pp. 205699712096214
Author(s):  
Perry L Glanzer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Early American ◽  
Collegiate Level ◽  
Small Set ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
God's Image ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Made In

Moral philosophy in early American collegiate education founded its understanding and pursuit of virtue on the theological truth that humans are made in God’s image. Therefore, to fulfill our purpose, we need to acquire creaturely analogues of God’s virtues. Later American moral philosophy scholars and texts, however, began to use a different rationale for teaching virtue—we need virtue to support American liberal democracy. As a result, by the late twentieth century, American moral educators at the collegiate level only focused on helping students develop a small set of virtues related to students’ professional and civic identities.

The Computer Judge

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Susskind
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Programming Systems ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What mutton-headed, technologically myopic luddite said this? I confess that these are my own words, as they appeared in 1986 in the Modern Law Review. Although this was comfortably more than thirty years ago, I can recall quite vividly what was going through my head (for want of a better term) when I wrote that passage. Today, I disagree with much that I said then. Emotionally, I no longer have any sense of horror in contemplating the possibility that judges might roundly be outperformed by machines. Technically, the passage of time has put me out of date. Computers often can (in some constrained circumstances) satisfactorily process speech and natural language. I also failed (along with most computer scientists) to predict that many of the remarkable advances in computing would come not through explicitly programming systems (whether, for example, to exhibit political preferences or creativity) but through machines ‘learning’ from vast sets of accumulated data. Morally, when I spoke of the values of western liberal democracy, I was reflecting the mood of the late twentieth century. As technology advances, it transpires, as Jamie Susskind explains in Future Politics, that our political conceptions change too. Liberal democracy in the twenty-first century may be significantly different from its ancestor.

Departures from Orthodoxy

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Steven J. Ericson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Monetary Policy ◽  
International Monetary Fund ◽  
Economic Nationalism ◽  
Finance Minister ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Made In

This introductory chapter briefly considers the ways in which the reforms of Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi unfolded along the lines of mid-nineteenth-century British-style orthodoxy or the late-twentieth-century International Monetary Fund version. It then goes on to argue that Matsukata was dealing with the challenge, shared by many of his contemporaries, of establishing a modern financial system in a developing state emerging from warfare and aiming to industrialize. At least on monetary policy, his economic nationalism was of the liberal nationalist variety like that of state leaders in other late industrializers. Moreover, Matsukata emerged as a practitioner primarily of unorthodox policies from the standpoint of both nineteenth- and late-twentieth-century versions of financial and economic orthodoxy. He also departed from orthodox mindsets in his pursuit of statist and nationalist priorities, his commitment to made-in-Japan solutions, his reliance on local intellectual tradition, and his willingness to be flexible in response to “the dictates of practical expediency,” as he would proclaim in 1886.

The Dougherty Valley Dilemma

2018 ◽  
pp. 85-116
Author(s):  
Alex Schafran
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Made In

Contra Costa County, one of California's original 27 counties, is a massive, fragmented, and diverse set of political, cultural, and physical lines that is a microcosm of regional fragmentation. It has also become one of the great battlegrounds in the planning fights of late twentieth-century California. Environmentalists and developers battled to an expensive and politically costly draw over a development in the heart of the county called Dougherty Valley. In the end, little progress was made in the deeper struggle against the unsustainable, unequal, and rapidly resegregating region, in part because no matter which side had “won” the battle over Dougherty Valley, the region and those impacted by its fragmentation and segregation would have lost. This is the so-called “Dougherty Valley dilemma,” which is the focus of this chapter.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Made In

This brief conclusion considers a group of films and videos about cinema made in the late twentieth century. Cinema has always been a favorite topic for filmmakers, and that tendency continued at the turn of the millennium. Rather than frame film as a perpetually modern medium, this work views it as an aging, fragile, and exhausted art, though it also considers the history of cinema as a paradoxical source of innovation and renewal. This conclusion surveys key examples of cinema trained on itself and links this reflexive filmmaking to the era’s dominant themes, including belatedness and nostalgia. A final discussion of the Derek Jarman’s Blue highlights the relationship between surface and depth, aesthetics and history explored in this archaeomodern cinema.

Reflections on the State of the Art in Western Qurʾanic Studies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devin Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Western European ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Made In

This chapter provides a survey of Western European qur’anic studies from ca. 1200 until the present. It proposes the chronological division of this scholarship into five periods, endeavouring to explain the significant accomplishments made in each, as well as the challenges scholars faced and the debates in which they engaged. It stresses the major interruption in the continuity of qur’anic studies that occurred in the mid­–late twentieth century. Then it provides an overview of current trends in qur’anic studies. While the field has certainly experienced a revival, several old problems have not been overcome, and systematic advances in the understanding of the Qurʾan are proceeding more slowly than one might imagine, given the amount of attention being focused on the work.

The Project of Self-Education in Plato’s Protagoras, Gorgias, and Meno

1998 ◽  
pp. 290-297
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Greek Thought ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Ethical Work ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

One vigorous line of thought in contemporary moral philosophy, which I shall call ‘Neo-Aristotelianism,’ centers on three things: (1) a rejection of traditional enlightenment moral theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism; (2) a claim that another look at the ethical concerns and projects of ancient Greek thought might help us past the impasse into which enlightenment moral theories have left us; (3) more particularly, an attempt to reinterpret Aristotle’s ethical work for the late twentieth-century so as to transcend this impasse.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

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