Word: positivists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trouble is the decline of our belief in reason as an instrument. Increasingly, we have substituted emotion for reason. Psychology has told us that seemingly rational arguments are determined by hidden and irrational forces inside ourselves, difficult if not impossible to reach. Positivist philosophy has told us that ethics is merely a game of words and that moral judgments are only opinions. In an odd and coincidental alliance, pop culture and recent radical theory gave us a kind of debased romanticism, glorifying feeling over thought, will or desire over reflection, violence over politics, and instant satisfaction over anything else...
...those of us who are not gentlemen, the paradox of football delights and intrigues. Albert Camus played goal. Sir Frederick Ayer, the philosopher, is a fan, and there is a sense in which soccer is a fair subject for a logical positivist. It is, after all, a precise and yet various system of semeiotics...
...speculation political philosopher Leo Strauss has laid the groundwork for this re-examination of current fashionable dogmas by re-examining, in the most meticulous and scholarly fashion, the entire tradition of modern philosophy that started with Bacon and Hobbes. Strauss's work has encouraged the reconsideration of the prevailing positivist philosophy which locates the noetic center of gravity in the natural sciences and mathematics and which is therefore "value free," independent of ethics. Such a political science, says Strauss, by refusing to make value judgments and distinguish between "great statesmen, mediocrities, and insane impostors" may be good bibliography...
...Kristol's view, the chief causes of this pervading nihilism have been the spread of higher education and of mass media as well as the long team effect of the secularist, positivist philosophy that emerged in the seventeenth century. Higher education since World War II has created a large class of academics and self-proclaimed intellectuals who readily make authoritative pronouncements in areas of public policy in which they have only marginal competence. This vocal sector has a tendency to judge a specific issue not by its individual merits, but solely in the light of certain fashionable general ideas...