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Culture - Was DH Lawrence a misogynist? Critics have found misogyny and racism in his provocative writings – but is this fair? The Culture Show revisits Lawrence’s life to get to the truth. Despite being one of English literature’s foremost authors, DH Lawrence’s reputation has been sullied and his works ridiculed for their treatment of love and sex. To his detractors, Lawrence has been described as a woman-hater, a racist − and even a pornographer. But fans of his writing applaud his search for freedom and his daring. British poet Simon Armitage compares reading Lawrence to: "watching somebody doing open-heart surgery on themselves… You don’t know where to look. " Empiricism. John Locke, a leading philosopher of British empiricism Empiricism is a theory which states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.[1] One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism and skepticism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory experience, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or traditions;[2] empiricists may argue however that traditions (or customs) arise due to relations of previous sense experiences.[3] Empiricism, often used by natural scientists, asserts that "knowledge is based on experience" and that "knowledge is tentative and probabilistic, subject to continued revision and falsification.

"[4] One of the epistemological tenets is that sensory experience creates knowledge. The scientific method, including experiments and validated measurement tools, guides empirical research. Etymology[edit] History[edit] Background[edit] Early empiricism[edit] Tabula rasa. The term also is used as the name of an epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that all of their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally, proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behaviour, and intelligence. History[edit] In Western philosophy, traces of the concept that became called tabula rasa appear as early as the writings of Aristotle.

Aristotle writes of the unscribed tablet in what is probably one of many textbooks of psychology in the Western canon, his treatise "Περί Ψυχῆς" (De Anima or On the Soul, Book III, chapter 4). Regardless of some arguments by the Stoics and Peripatetics, however, the notion of the mind as a blank slate went largely unnoticed for more than 1,000 years. In the thirteenth century, St. Tabula rasa also features in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Science[edit] Carboniferous. Subdivisions[edit] Late Pennsylvanian: Gzhelian (most recent) Noginskian / Virgilian (part) Late Pennsylvanian: Kasimovian KlazminskianDorogomilovksian / Virgilian (part)Chamovnicheskian / Cantabrian / MissourianKrevyakinskian / Cantabrian / Missourian Middle Pennsylvanian: Moscovian Myachkovskian / Bolsovian / DesmoinesianPodolskian / DesmoinesianKashirskian / AtokanVereiskian / Bolsovian / Atokan Early Pennsylvanian: Bashkirian / Morrowan Melekesskian / DuckmantianCheremshanskian / LangsettianYeadonianMarsdenianKinderscoutian Late Mississippian: Serpukhovian AlportianChokierian / Chesterian / ElvirianArnsbergian / ElvirianPendleian Middle Mississippian: Visean Brigantian / St Genevieve / Gasperian / ChesterianAsbian / MeramecianHolkerian / SalemArundian / Warsaw / MeramecianChadian / Keokuk / Osagean (part) / Osage (part) Early Mississippian: Tournaisian (oldest) Ivorian / (part) / Osage (part)Hastarian / Kinderhookian / Chouteau Paleogeography[edit] Climate and weather[edit] Rocks and coal[edit]

Amniote. The first amniotes (referred to as "basal amniotes") resembled small lizards and evolved from the amphibian reptiliomorphs about 312 million years ago,[2] in the Carboniferous geologic period. Their eggs could survive out of the water, allowing amniotes to branch out into drier environments. The eggs could also "breathe" and cope with wastes, allowing the eggs and the amniotes themselves to evolve into larger forms.

The amniotic egg represents a critical divergence within the vertebrates, one enabled to reproduce on dry land—free of the need to return to water for reproduction as required of the amphibians. From this point the amniotes spread across the globe, eventually to become the dominant land vertebrates. Very early in the evolutionary history of amniotes, basal amniotes diverged into two main lines, the synapsids and the sauropsids, both of which persist into the modern era. Description[edit] Anatomy of an amniotic egg 1. Adaptions for a terrestrial life[edit] Amniote traits[edit] Baruch Spinoza. Biography[edit] Family and community origins[edit] Spinoza's ancestors were of Sephardic Jewish descent, and were a part of the community of Portuguese Jews that had settled in the city of Amsterdam in the wake of the Alhambra Decree in Spain (1492) and the Portuguese Inquisition (1536), which had resulted in forced conversions and expulsions from the Iberian peninsula.[11] Attracted by the Decree of Toleration issued in 1579 by the Union of Utrecht, Portuguese "conversos" first sailed to Amsterdam in 1593 and promptly reconverted to Judaism.[12] In 1598 permission was granted to build a synagogue, and in 1615 an ordinance for the admission and government of the Jews was passed.[13] As a community of exiles, the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam were highly proud of their identity.[13] Spinoza's father, Miguel (Michael), and his uncle, Manuel, then moved to Amsterdam where they resumed the practice of Judaism. 17th-century Holland[edit] Early life[edit] Expulsion from the Jewish community[edit]

The Slavoj Žižek v Noam Chomsky spat is worth a ringside seat | Peter Thompson. Slavoj Žižek and Noam Chomsky. Photograph: David Levene and Graeme Robertson In the great spat between King Kong Chomsky and Tyrannosaurus Žižek people are often asked which side they are on. Or maybe they are not, because until now these two great beasts have been roaring and knocking down trees without anyone outside leftist discourse hearing them fall. But maybe we should think who we would cheer on, because this is a debate about something very important – namely the relationship between theory, ideology and reality. Noam Chomsky, the professional contrarian, has accused Slavoj Žižek, the professional heretic, of posturing in the place of theory. This is an accusation often levelled at Žižek from within the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition. Žižek has countered with the side-swipe that nobody had been so empirically wrong throughout his life as Chomsky. For the empiricists the word "real" refers to something, well, real; something pre-existing which has to be uncovered.

The Frankfurt school, part 8: where do we go from here? | Peter Thompson. The final question for this series is whether any of the issues brought up by the Frankfurt school still have any currency or importance. There are two distinct periods in the work of the Frankfurt school. On the one hand there is the attempt to explain and understand fascism as it was arising during the Weimar Republic. This was a period of social, economic and political dislocation that brought to the fore very real material concerns on the part of workers that could easily be channelled into a traditional search for scapegoats and simple explanations. During this period, however, there continued to exist a powerful workers' movement in the form of social democracy and communism which, had it been able to overcome the timidity of the former and the strategic incompetence of the latter, could have functioned as a bulwark against the rise of the extreme right.

The great recession since 2008 has stripped away a lot of the illusions people have about the society they live in. The Frankfurt school, part 7: what's left? | Peter Thompson. Although I have concentrated very clearly on the big names of classical Frankfurt school history and their relationship to fascism, capitalism and the conditions created by the Weimar Republic, the Frankfurt school still exists today. Its influence, largely through Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, remains considerable. From early Adorno to late Habermas and on to Honneth is a very great distance but there are certain threads running through all of this work.

As Axel Honneth himself points out, one of these threads is the idea of reification. He goes back to Georgy Lukacs's work on this concept in his History and Class Consciousness from 1925 to point out that although the term went out of fashion in the postwar period, apart from its short-lived rediscovery by the 1968 movement, it has never really gone away and is beginning to re-emerge today. Reification in one form or another has been the determining concept of western Marxism since the Bolshevik revolution. The Frankfurt school, part 6: Ernst Bloch and the Principle of Hope | Peter Thompson. "We must believe in the Principle of Hope. A Marxist does not have the right to be a pessimist" We cannot count Ernst Bloch as being among the central figures of the Frankfurt School. Indeed they maintained a distance from each other for many different reasons. However, Bloch was perhaps a figurative intellectual influence on many members of the Frankfurt School. Bloch's magnum opus was a three-volume compendium entitled The Principle of Hope in which he lays out the myriad ways in which hope and the human desire for liberation and fulfilment appear in our everyday lives.

In this way he differentiated himself from the Frankfurt school and indeed they distanced themselves from him because he was not prepared to take the standard Freudian line on the rise of fascism. However, he also pointed out that this process of attaining utopia was a self-generating one. The Frankfurt school, part 5: Walter Benjamin, fascism and the future | Peter Thompson.

Quoting Hegel, Walter Benjamin reminds us that before all philosophy comes the struggle for material existence: "Secure at first food and clothing, and the kingdom of God will come to you of itself – Hegel, 1807", or as Brecht – Benjamin's greatest and closest friend – put it "first bread, then morality". But this precisely did not mean that abstraction, speculation and thought per se had to be rejected in favour of an entirely mechanistic historical materialism. What sets all of the thinkers in this series apart from many of their more orthodox Marxist contemporaries is precisely their concern with those issues which cannot be measured, tested and decided upon but which remain undecided and undecidable. As Benjamin puts it in his On the Concept of History: "The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual.

The Frankfurt school, part 4: Herbert Marcuse | Peter Thompson. When the student generation took off in the 1960s across Europe, in Germany at least it was Herbert Marcuse who had the greatest influence. This is because whereas Adorno, with his highly pessimistic philosophical statements about historical development, could talk about a negative progression of humanity from the "slingshot to the megaton bomb", Marcuse continued to maintain a more optimistic view of what could be achieved. Indeed, when 1968 happened, Marcuse said that he was happy to say that all of their theories had been proved completely wrong. Also, Marcuse wrote in a far more accessible way about the ways in which philosophy and politics were intertwined. How was it, Marcuse asked, that the totalising administered state, which he saw at work in western societies, got away with it?

Parliamentary democracy, he maintains for example, is merely a sham, a game played out in order to give the impression that people have a say in the way that society works. The Frankfurt school, part 3: Dialectic of Enlightenment | Peter Thompson. The Frankfurt school came together and developed its theories in a world left shattered by the first world war. The Weimar Republic was essentially a shell-shocked society in which many of the old certainties had been smashed to pieces. Worse than that, nothing had arisen from the ruins to give anyone any hope for the future. As liberal democracy failed and Weimar spiralled down into Nazism, this school of almost entirely Jewish-Marxist intellectuals were forced to flee a country which had turned against them for reasons of both race and politics.

One of their most cherished members, Walter Benjamin, killed himself in 1940 on the French-Spanish border, an act which threw many of the remaining members into even greater depression. Changing their country more often than they changed their shoes, as Bertolt Brecht put it, they ended up in the US during the Hitler years and although this was a refuge for them, it was not a society they felt had anything to offer humanity. The Frankfurt school, part 2: Negative dialectics | Peter Thompson. Already in the comments about the first instalment of this series, a problem of traditions has emerged. For a predominantly Anglo-Saxon audience, raised in the empirical and positivist tradition, understanding a group of thinkers schooled in speculative Hegelianism and Marxist dialectics is always going to require a leap of faith.

This is also compounded by the fact that the largely monoglot Anglo-Saxon tradition has to work with translations of these thinkers, which are not always the best that can be achieved. For example, terms such as Wissenschaft and Geist traditionally get translated into "science" and "spirit", apparently irreconcilable opposites, whereas in philosophical terms the difference between the two is much less marked.

In fact, you might argue that in the original German they could both be translated as "knowledge", albeit different types of knowledge bounded by speculation. The Frankfurt school, part 1: why did Anders Breivik fear them? | Peter Thompson. When Anders Breivik launched his murderous attack in Norway in July 2011, he left behind a rambling manifesto which attacked not only what he saw as Europe's Islamicisation but also its undermining by the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt school. So what is the Frankfurt school? Has its influence has been as deep as Breivik feared and many of the rest of us have hoped? Many will have heard of the most prominent names from that tradition: Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer, but its reach goes much further, taking in many of the 20th century's most important continental philosophers and socio-political developments.

The Frankfurt school went back to Marx's early theoretical works from the 1840s and tapped into his more humanist impulses found in the German-French Annals and in his correspondence with Arnold Ruge. It is in these early writings that we find many of Marx's most important writings on the role of religion in history and society. Radical thinkers: Ludwig Feuerbach on religion - video. Radical thinkers: Max Horkheimer's Critique of Instrumental Reason - video.