Word: priori
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Frye's faith in the imagination and his rejection of a priori beliefs suggest his liberal bias towards processes over ends. That bias is strikingly in evidence in two of the essays in Spiritus Mundi, both of which condemn student radicals of the 1960s for their attack on educational processes. In "The University and the Personal Life," Frye places student unrest in the tradition of American anarchism, categorizing it primarily as a religious quest rather than a social movement. What he objects to most is the anti-intellectualism of the protesters, their refusal to appeal to "reason or experience...
...working class cannot be asked for sacrifices when its largest representation in parliament, the Communist Party, is "excluded a priori from any say in government," he said...
...priori, sociobiological models do not necessarily imply a greater constriction of the possibilities for constructive social change than do "environmental" models proposed by cultural materialist writers such as Marvin Harris...
...editorial of February 1st on the lessons of the Vietnam War, but this editorial was hardly a defense of Robert Tucker's Commentary article on the use of force in the Persian Gulf. It urged that we pay attention to Tucker's argument and not reject it on a priori grounds. But finally The New Republic found the risks of intervention "great" and the moral issues "ambiguous," and urged economic rather than military measures to cope with the oil crisis...
There is only one way to tell: by a thorough examination of the phenomena by those who do not express an a priori belief. By those for whom probability is not a mystique but a comprehensible code. By those who have nothing to lose but their skepticism. Until such examiners are allowed to play the psychic game, it is unlikely that the paranormal will escape the ambiguous utterance against it in Leviticus: "Do not turn to mediums or wizards; do not seek them out, to be defiled by them ..." And that most wondrous and mysterious of entities, the human mind...