An aphorism attributed to Albert Einstein—“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”—appears to have been derived from a longer passage in his 1933 Herbert Spencer Lecture, ...given in Oxford and titled “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” in which he suggested that theories should not be so simple as to “surrender the adequate representation of a single datum experience.”Aphorisms are supposed to illustrate truisms in short, pithy maxims. However, they are not always short or pithy and do not always illustrate truisms. For example, an aphorism attributed to William Osler begins with an important injunction (“Listen to the patient …”) but continues with a misleading assertion (“… he is telling you the diagnosis”). The patient’s tale is generally incomplete and needs to be supplemented by careful questioning and followed by careful observation, examination, and investigation. The aphorism might therefore be rewritten, less pithily but more accurately: “Listen to what the patient tells you, both spontaneously and on careful questioning; the patient’s tale is the first step on the road to a complete diagnosis.”
During the British Enlightenment, the correlation between effective communication and moral excellence was undisputed—so much so that rhetoric was taught as a means of instilling desirable ...values in students. In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue , Mark Garrett Longaker explores the connections between rhetoric and ethics in the context of the history of capitalism.
Longaker’s study lingers on four British intellectuals from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century: philosopher John Locke, political economist Adam Smith, rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Across one hundred and fifty years, these influential men sought to mold British students into good bourgeois citizens by teaching them the discursive habits of clarity, sincerity, moderation, and economy, all with one incontrovertible truth in mind: the free market requires virtuous participants in order to thrive.
Through these four case studies—written as biographically focused yet socially attentive intellectual histories—Longaker portrays the British rhetorical tradition as beholden to the dual masters of ethics and economics, and he sheds new light on the deliberate intellectual engineering implicit in Enlightenment pedagogy.
This article explores the religious response of one neglected writer to the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer. William Todd Martin was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and in ...1887 published The Evolution Hypothesis: A Criticism of the New Cosmic Philosophy. The work demonstrates the essentially contested nature of “evolution” and “creation” by showing how a self-confessed creationist could affirm an evolutionary understanding of the natural world and species transformation. Martin's approach reflected a transatlantic Presbyterian worldview that saw the harmony of science and religion on the basis of Calvinism, Baconianism and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Martin's critique is also relevant to issues that continue to animate philosophers of science and religion, including the connections between mind and matter, morality and consciousness in a Darwinian framework, and the relationship between subjective conscious experience and evolutionary physicalism. Martin was able to anticipate these debates because his critique was essentially philosophical and theological rather than biological and biblicist.
Este artículo plantea el estudio de la envidia como concepto filosófico a través de la novela o «nivola» Abel Sánchez de Miguel de Unamuno. Para ello, se estudiará la influencia de este sentimiento ...en el ser humano y su percepción a través del pensador vasco. En este recorrido serán decisivos aquellos poetas y filósofos ingleses y alemanes que influyeron en la personalidad literaria de Unamuno —Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer o Herbert Spencer—, a camino entre el pensamiento y la ficción. También tendrá una gran importancia la posible repercusión posterior de Unamuno en otras obras y autores como Segundo Serrano Poncela, Julián Marías, Joan Oliver o José Saramago. En el análisis de Abel Sánchez, se valora la envidia por su capacidad para incitar el desarrollo de actividad en el individuo generando incluso conocimiento, a fin de eclipsar a otra persona y sus virtudes.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND DEMOCRACY IN THE WRITINGS OF CLASSICAL LIBERALS – JOHN STUART MILL AND HERBERT SPENCER The main aim of this paper is showing mainstream economic theory as an important factor ...shaping the evolution of political liberalism. The role of the economic theory in this process seems underestimated. The paper analyses the writings of two classical liberal thinkers – John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, the former a pioneer of egalitarian liberalism, the latter of laissez-faire liberalism. Both Mill and Spencer were the followers of the classical political economy accepting the classical theory of distribution. Both saw the distribution of wealth as a spontaneous process, seeing no possibility correcting it for the people’s sake without disturbances or damages. According to the classical theory of wage fund, workers would get higher incomes only through accumulation of capital by owners and repressing their own fertility. Such statement was fundamentally opposite to all postulates of the workers’ movement. Workers always claimed bigger share in social income and legislation favoring laborers. The inevitable result of this contradiction was a conflict between liberal and democratic ideas. Mill and Spencer proposed two different solutions. J. S. Mill found a specific compromise and proposed enlarging franchise on working class, but with a still dominant position of the educated classes. Mill was against equal franchise for the working class because he did not conceive them as liable, rational and sober people. This position results from the wage fund doctrine; according to it, abundant workers’ fertility is wasteful for them and only sexual restraint (or chastity) would make their wages higher. Spencer in his early writing was an enthusiast of democracy, supposing the working class’ affinity to free market solutions. His later disappointment with democracy turned him into a strong critic of democratic parliamentarism from the standpoint of laissez-faire individualism. The case of these two liberal thinkers shows fundamental difficulty in reconciliation between the ideas of democracy and free market. We could choose democracy accepting welfare state or choose free market solution and become unambiguous critics of democracy. Spencer was a forerunner of all later ‘neoliberal’ critics of welfare state. Mill’s opinion was halfway between laissez-faire liberalism and modern egalitarian liberalism. Democracy and equal voting rights became acceptable by mainstream economist only when they had abandoned the wage fund doctrine and other constructs of the classical political economy. Thus changes in the economic theory had a significant impact on the evolution of political liberalism.
The English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) was a colossus of the Victorian age. His works ranked alongside those of Darwin and Marx in the development of disciplines as wide ranging as ...sociology, anthropology, political theory, philosophy and psychology.
In this acclaimed study of Spencer, the first for over thirty years and now available in paperback, Mark Francis provides an authoritative and meticulously researched intellectual biography of this remarkable man that dispels the plethora of misinformation surrounding Spencer and shines new light on the broader cultural history of the nineteenth century. In this major study of Spencer, the first for over thirty years, Mark Francis provides an authoritative and meticulously researched intellectual biography of this remarkable man. Using archival material and contemporary printed sources, Francis creates a fascinating portrait of a human being whose philosophical and scientific system was a unique attempt to explain modern life in all its biological, psychological and sociological forms.
Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life fills what is perhaps the last big biographical gap in Victorian history. An exceptional work of scholarship it not only dispels the plethora of misinformation surrounding Spencer but shines new light on the broader cultural history of the nineteenth century. Elegantly written, provocative and rich in insight it will be required reading for all students of the period.
Mark Francis is Professor of Political Science at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
'The publication of Mark Francis's volume marks a significant moment not just for Spencer scholarship but for all historians of late nineteenth-century science. A great achievement - the book that Spencer studies has needed for quite some time.' - British Journal for the History of Science 'A magisterial study which is likely to remain a standard reference on its subject for many years to come.' - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 'Francis has produced an important and intelligent book not only on Spencer, but also on his political, scientific, social, and religious context in mid-Victorian Britain. In relocating the assumptions about Victorian politics, social science, and evolutionary biology, this work deserves a wide audience, within and well beyond historical scholarship.' - The Historical Journal
Este artículo analiza la recepción de Nietzsche de la teoría social de Spencer a partir de dos fragmentos póstumos de 1881. El objetivo será, a través de una investigación de fuentes y siguiendo las ...anotaciones de Nietzsche en los libros conservados en su biblioteca personal, mostrar el modo característico de Nietzsche de experimentar con las tesis de sus contemporáneos. Estas tentativas lo conducirán a una instrumentalización estratégica de las ideas de Spencer para postular, apoyándose en la fisiología y la teoría del derecho de Post, modelos originales de individualidad que se encuentran en las antípodas del organicismo.
After documenting Tarde’s neglect and placing him in the 19th-century sociological context, this paper argues that his concept of “imitation” was important because social learning (writ small) or ...culture (writ large), a non-genetic form of heredity, means that a distinct cultural evolutionary process including variation and selection resulting in descent with modification is inevitable. Beginning in the last half of the 20th century there was a flowering of theorizing and research about cultural evolution across the humanities and social sciences and eventually about culture in general in sociology. Unfortunately, what should have been recognized as Tarde’s role as a forefather of these has only occasionally been recognized.
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