scholarly journals The Empirical Stance vs. The Critical Attitude

2005 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 200-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darrell Patrick Rowbottom
Keyword(s):  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Empirical Stance

“Against the Background of Pushkin”: S.I. Vavilov’s Speech at a Meeting at the Poet’s Monument in June 1949

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 550-559
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Yu. Samarin
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Ussr Academy ◽  
Russian Scientist ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
150Th Anniversary ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
The Press ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

The article introduces a previously unpublished speech of the outstanding Russian scientist-physicist, President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, academician Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov, which was delivered by him at the anniversary meeting held on June 5, 1949, at the monument to Alexander Pushkin in Moscow in connection with the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the great Russian poet’s birth. S.I. Vavilov was a great connoisseur of Pushkin’s poetry and literature about him. In the second half of the 1940s, Vavilov actively participated in projects to prepare the anniversary celebrations dedicated to Alexander Pushkin and perpetuate the memory of the poet. Analysis of S.I. Vavilov’s speech, which, unlike his other “Pushkin speeches”, was not intended for the press, shows that in evaluating the great poet’s work, along with the use of cliches, traditional for the epoch, the scientist also took certain liberties. In particular, he did not utter the ritual words praising Stalin, the Communist Party and the Soviet State. The poet Ya.P. Polonsky quoted by Vavilov was not among the classics recognized by Soviet literary criticism, and the selected quote from him could be interpreted as a hint of condemnation of the surrounding Stalinist reality. Numerous fragments of the scientist’s personal diaries indicate his critical attitude towards the latter, in particular.

G.K. Chesterton’s Works in Literary-Critical Review by K.I. Chukovsky

2020 ◽  
pp. 37-47
Author(s):  
Svetlana Morozova ◽  
Dmitrij Zhatkin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Review ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Disorder ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
The Social

The article is devoted to the perception of K.I. Chukovsky’s works by a famous English writer G.K. Chesterton. K.I. Chukovsky was one of the first to point out the ambiguity of the literary works by the English writer and called his journalistic activity more convincing. Describing G.K. Chesterton’s essays, K.I. Chukovsky believed that the writer is second to none in this genre. He praised G.K. Chesterton’s journalistic talent in responding to all the phenomena of contemporary social life. K.I. Chukovsky considered it obligatory for the Russian readers to familiarize themselves with the critical works of the English author. In the essay «Gilbert Chesterton. Manalive» (1924) K.I. Chukovsky substantiated why, for all the variety of genre forms that G.K. Chesterton used, Russian readers were familiar with only a few of his works. K.I. Chukovsky’s critical attitude to the novel «Manalive» is explained by his rejection of G.K. Chesterton’s utopian attitude to the social situation in England at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. In G.K. Chesterton’s works K.I. Chukovsky saw a simulation of revolutionary pathos that did not solve pressing issues of social disorder.

Foucault as Superauthor

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-125
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Main Motivation ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
Lecture Courses

Three phases in Foucault’s examination of authorship and free speech were essential to him throughout his life. They can be linked to such texts as the three lectures “What is an Author?” (first phase), “What is Critique?,” and “What is Revolution?” (second phase), and the two lecture courses, “Fearless Speech,” and “The Courage of Truth” (third phase). Initially, Foucault merely describes the founders of discursivity (hence, “superauthors”), among whom he reckoned only Marx and Freud, as the sole alternative to his own conceptualization of the author function, which is exhibited en masse in contemporary society. He then modifies his views on superauthorship by making Kant the paradigm and by linking his own concept of free speech to a Kan-tian critical attitude. However, Foucault claims only the half of Kant’s philosophical legacy that is related to the study of the ontology of the self.The article advances the hypothesis that the sovereign power of speech, which can be found in Marx and Heidegger and in generally in the concept of “superauthorship,” becomes unacceptable for Foucault. During the third phase, the danger of a tyrannical use of free speech compels Foucault to make a number of fruitful but questionable choices in his work. He focuses on a single aspect of free speech in which a speaker is in a weaker position and therefore has to overcome his fear in order to tell the truth. Foucault associates this kind of free speech with the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia, which according to his interpretation means “fearless speech”; however, this reading is not always supported by the ancient Greek sources. Foucault’s deliberations bring him to the radical conclusion that free speech transforms into performative “aesthetics of existence.” Foucault’s main motivation for pursuing this line of thought all through his life was to investigate his own abilities and powers as an author

John Locke: The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Empirical Stance

The purpose of this book is to present the philosophical thought of John Locke as the work of a Christian virtuoso. In his role as ‘virtuoso’, an experimental natural philosopher of the sort that flourished in England during the seventeenth century, Locke was a proponent of the so-called ‘new philosophy’, a variety of atomism that emerged in early modern Europe. But he was also a practicing Christian, and he professed confidence that the two vocations were not only compatible but mutually sustaining. Locke aspired, without compromising his empirical stance, to unite the two vocations in a single philosophical endeavor with the aim of producing a system of Christian philosophy. Although the birth of the modern secular outlook did not happen smoothly or without many conflicts of belief, Locke, in his role of Christian virtuoso, endeavored to resolve apparent contradictions. Nuovo draws attention to the often-overlooked complexities and diversity of Locke’s thought, and argues that Locke must now be counted among the creators of early modern systems of philosophy.

The Empirical Stance ? Bas van Fraassen

2006 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-177
Author(s):  
John Ross Churchill
Keyword(s):  
Van Fraassen ◽  
Bas Van Fraassen ◽  
Empirical Stance

scholarly journals The critical attitude in medicine: the need for a new ethics.

BMJ ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 287 (6409) ◽  
pp. 1919-1923 ◽  
Author(s):  
N McIntyre ◽  
K Popper
Keyword(s):  
Critical Attitude

scholarly journals The Sphere of Critical Thinking in a Post-Epistemic World

1994 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Big Science ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Attitude

Just as political theorists have long argued that democracy is viable only in communities of certain sizes and shapes, perhaps epistemologists should also entertain the idea that knowledge is possible only within certain social parameters-ones which today's world may have exceeded. This is what I mean by the "postepistemic" society. I understand an "epistemic society" in Popperian terms as an environment that fosters the spirit of conjectures and refutations. After castigating analytic philosophers for their failure to see this point, I show how Rousseau and Feyerabend occupy analogous positions as critics of, respectively, the nation-state and Big Science. Rather than endorsing the disestablishment of the state, however, I offer a proposal for reinjecting the critical attitude into Big Science. It involves heightening the sporting character of scientific disputes, perhaps even to the point of enabling the public to bet on their outcomes.

scholarly journals “I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism”: The other Dickens and other Victorians in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Other ◽  
Public Image ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Public Persona

Abstract This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

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