Showing papers on "Realism published in 1969"

Gibson's realism

Abstract: Philosophers should welcome scientists who bother to put their theories and data at the disposal of philosophical debate. When such a distinguished psychologist as J. J. Gibson calls our attention to features of his most recent work which he thinks lend new support for realism, philosophers of perception should pay close attention. 1 The most interesting aspect of Gibson's important new book is not, however, support or non-support for realism, but rather the particular way in which Gibson now views sensation and perception. Gibson is concerned to place the senses in their total environmental context, to consider them as parts of a system of information-extraction, rather than as separate atoms of impulseor sensation-production. He distinguishes \"the input to the nervous system that evokes conscious sensation from the input that evokes perception\" (p. 2). A notion of'sensationless perception' as the source of information replaces all notions of sensations as the basic unit of perception. There are invariants of energy accessible to our sensory receptors which yield information without producing sensations. These invariants \"correspond to the permanent properties of the environment\", hence the realism (p. 3). Before I get round to commenting upon Gibson's realism, I want to discuss a number of questions which a philosopher must raise about Gibson's 'information'. Gibson recognizes, of course, that physiological studies (behavioural ones, too) may be of some relevance to understanding perception, but he insists that perception has to be understood in terms of information pick-up. The stress upon information pick-up is Gibson's way of recognizing what some philosophers have been saying, that perception, can be analyzed and understood only in perceptual terms. Gibson's 'information' consists of cognitive facts about our environment. What he likes to call his 'ecological' study places the organism in its experiential and cognitive environment and then seeks to discover how the organism learns about that environment. It is because of this stress upon the cognitive, conscious features of perception that Gibson likes to remind us that sensing or the

Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge

Abstract: Preface 1. Introduction 2. The Nature of Philosophy 3. The Method of Analysis 4. Russell's Empiricism 5. Realism 6. Conclusion

Cymbeline: "Lopp'd Branches" and the Concept of Regeneration

Abstract: HAKESPEARE'S Cymbeline is a regrettably underrated and overlooked play. Misunderstood and evaluated upon false grounds, it is far better than many commentators recognize, for it embraces a multeity of Shakespearian devices, themes, and structural principles, with an energy of fusion characteristic only of the dramatist's maturity. Part of the trouble with the typical analysis of Cymbeline would seem to result from the fruitlessness of applying methods of critical realism to this type of play. In the gossamer tissue of the play's action, the dramatist did not attempt full-scale psychological portraits; nor did he foresee the malignant "motive hunting" of some of those "literalists of the imagination" who currently infest the standing pool of literary criticism.1 Too much, therefore, can be made of a lack of realism in the treatment of action and character in Cymbeline, for the play is dealing with romantic materials exclusively, and it is processing them with the emotional logic of the folk, the cohesive inner reality of fairy tales, of folk ritual, and of the folk-drama. Perhaps a brief look at D. A. Traversi's discerning commentary on the late plays will help to illustrate the prevailing critical attitude toward Cymbeline:

The Division of the Heart: Cable's the Grandissimes

Abstract: In an important sense, George W. Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) may be said to be the first "modern" Southern novel. For if the modern Southern novel has been characterized by its uncompromising attempt to deal honestly with the complexity of Southern racial experience, then The Grandissimes was the first important work of fiction written by a Southerner in which that intention is manifested. In this respect, Cable opened up the path along which Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, William Styron and others would follow. In unmistakable and uncompromising terms, he dealt with that most pervasive of all Southern social issues, the race question and the role of the Negro in society. If the loss of the Civil War had at last freed the Southern writer from the need to defend Southern racial attitudes, it was Cable who first took advantage of the new freedom. In its own day The Grandissimes was highly praised, and its author compared, and not unfavorably, to Nathaniel Hawthorne himself. Along with Old Creole Days, the volume of short stories that was his first published book, the novel seemed to augur a brilliant career for the young ex-Confederate cavalryman and cotton house clerk now come into national literary prominence. Unfortunately, that promise was never borne out. Cable went on to write seven more novels and numerous short stories before his death in 1925, but nothing that he did was ever to surpass, or even to equal, the literary achievement of his first two books. To explain why Gable failed to develop beyond his first work is more than can be attempted in the confines of a single essay. It involves complex questions of time and place, his relationship to the South and to the Genteel Tradition that dominated American letters during the latter years of the nineteenth century, and, most importantly of all, his own complicated and sometimes even contradictory personality. All the same, if we look carefully at The Grandissimes, both in terms of its successes and its shortcomings, we may discover some clues to the answer. "I meant," Cable wrote later in his life, "to make The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called.... I was still very slowly and painfully guessing out the riddle of our Southern question." And again, "I wrote as near to truth and justice as I knew how, upon questions that I saw must be settled by calm debate and cannot be settled by force or silence; questions that will have to be settled thus by the Southern white man in his own conscience before even the North and South can finally settle it between them. This was part of my politics and as a citizen I wrote." But Cable's novel was more than a disquisition on race; it was also the picture of a society in transition, very much a Kulturroman as his friend the novelist H. H. Boyesen had predicted. And although set in New Orleans in 1803, just after the Louisiana Territory had been purchased by the United States from France, its implications were very much for post-Civil War Louisiana. What seems most striking about The Grandissimes today is its rich social texture. Though the story had its romantic elements, in particular the conventional love story plot of the day, more than almost any other Southern novel of its time it was, to use the distinction set forth by Hawthorne in his Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, a Novel, as opposed to a Romance, in that it presumed to deal with the "probable and ordinary course of man's experience" rather than the fanciful, the Marvellous. Not of course that it is a work of Howellsian realism, and still less does it resemble the kind of faithfulness to everyday life of a Sinclair Lewis or a Sherwood Anderson. But its essential fidelity is to the here and now. The dynamics of the story arise from the problems of caste and class, the human beings are portrayed to a remarkable degree as they exist in everyday life. …

Synthesis: The Artistic Theory of Fenollosa and Dow

Abstract: In which the author, an enthusiast since high school of Dow's book on Composition, argues that just as the theories of these two teachers were of great influence in liberating American art from the tenets of strict realism which prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century, so today Synthesis might be similarly effective against non-objectity “as a bid for shaking this persistent trend out of its lethargy, for pointing out its shortcomings, and for indicating the direction toward something of a better-rounded character.”

A Pattern of Character Development in War and Peace: Prince Andrej.

Abstract: It is, or ought to be, one of the scandals of modern criticism in Englishspeaking countries that there exist so few attempts to analyze in detail the structure and artistry of Tolstoj's War and Peace. From at least the time of Matthew Arnold, Henry James, Percy Lubbock, and E. M. Forster the myth has persisted in many quarters that Tolstoj simply does not require such analysis. Because the great length of War and Peace and its multitude of characters and incidents prevent it from being readily grasped as a totality, readers have often thought it to be merely a shapeless panorama, extremely vivid and persuasive in its "realism," but lacking in definable "form" and "technique." With the divine prerogative and blind creative energy of a kind of demiurge, it sometimes seems to be suggested, Tolstoj dispenses with the merely mortal artist's need to select, order, and proportion his materials, and with lavish insouciance simply presents us, in some mysterious way, with "life" in all its fluid, amorphous abundance.' A recent statement of this point of view is by Philip Rahv: "In a sense," he tells us, "there are no plots in Tolstoi [sic] but simply the unquestioned and unalterable process of life itself; such is the astonishing immediacy with which he possesses his characters that he can dispense with manipulative techniques, as he dispenses with the belletristic devices of exaggeration, distortion, and dissimulation. The fable, that specifically literary contrivance, or anything else which is merely invented or made up to suit the occasion, is very rarely found in his work."2 It follows that our task is only to marvel at the uniqueness of this achievement, or, as Ralph E. Matlaw, in criticizing this kind of attitude, has put it, "to show what that 'life' is rather than how it is presented; to reduce it to its 'essence' rather than to investigate the art that discloses it in all its fullness; to make reasonable and formulaic what Tolstoy has made tangible."3 In the last fifteen or sixteen years several younger critics have made efforts to correct this false approach,4 but much remains to be done.

Sociologia da ciência: realismo, idealismo e construtivismo

Abstract: The neopragmatic turn, overwhelming criticism of the foundational role of knowledge self advocated by philosophy, radical as to include the analytic philosophy, where it originated, is inexorably the current frontier of philosophical knowledge. The coup given to the philosophy and to the reason for neopragmatic movement, however, must be reported as something positive. The reactions raised in defense of philosophy organized themselves around reduced number of conceptual matrix: strong naturalism (Quine,1969), weak naturalism (Habermas,2004), objective idealism (Hosle,1987), contextualism (Rorty,1994). Contributed unquestionably to this outcome, the historical and sociological studies of postKuhnian science, inspired by its philosophy of science. Inserting tangentially in this debate, the object of reflection in this study is to oppose the point of view of the sociology of science to the realism and to the idealism. Our aim is to demonstrate that constructivism featuring your model of inquiry does not denies, as naive or maliciously understand his critics, the decisive role of nature in the construction of science. The strength of our argument will arise from the analysis realized by the exponents of the strong program in the sociology of science, Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry (1996), in the book Scientific Knowledge: a sociological analysis, of a controversial case study of the history of physics: the experiments that the American physicist Robert Millikan conducted to establish the electron charge

Sastre on Brecht: The Dialectics of Revolutionary Theatre

Abstract: Alfonso Sastre is one of a very limited number of postwar Spanish dramatists who have attracted attention outside Spain. He is also the only contemporary Spanish writer who has developed a dynamic, lucid theory of the drama. Since 1949, in hundreds of essays and two books, Sastre has explored virtually every aspect of the dramatic art in a sustained effort to find a theoretical basis for a valid contemporary theatre. 1 This search has been informed by Sastre's own revolutionary values and has centered around the concept of realismo profundizado: "penetrative realism," a realism which is not illusion-of-life naturalism nor unilateral socialist propaganda, but rather a clarification of the existential and social tensions that define contemporary man. Sastre's theatre, in practice and theory, is essentially Aristotelian in its form and revolutionary in its ideology. Its aims are testimony, illumination, and agitation of consciences. Its dramatic tension derives from the dialectical confrontation of opposing realities which Sastre perceives as fundamental to the modern human condition: man as existence and man as history, despair and hope, thought and action, individual integrity and political necessity. In moral terms this dialectic becomes relativism. In philosophical terms it represents a search for reconciliation and synthesis, a desire to reintegrate modern man, alienated from himself, from his fellows, and from the forces that control his life. In social terms, Sastre's dialectic calls for a socialist transformation of the world. And in dramatic terms it implies tensions, conflicts, painful decisions, and ambiguous resolution of complex entanglements. Sastre's theoretical probing has taken him through the work of some modern giants of the theatre: Strindberg, Lenormand, O'Neill, Miller, Sartre, and Beckett. His essays on these figures are significant attempts to expand the cultural horizons of Spain, whose intellectual and artistic life has been seriously limited, since 1939, by stultifying circumstances. Somewhat belatedly Sastre "discovers" Bertolt Brecht and undertakes an energetic examination of the assumptions and practice of the Brechtian theatre. In addition to giving diffusion in Spain to Brecht's thought, Sastre's theoretical encounter with the great German artist is interesting because of the perspective it brings to the dramatic theories of both Sastre and Brecht.