Tag Archives: philosophy/religion

De Stijl

“De Stijl: Now synonymous with the term Neo-Plasticism, De Stijl was the name of a Dutch journal started by Theo van Doesburg in 1917 which, as the organ of Neo-Plasticism, was influential in spreading the theories of Piet Mondrian. These ideas strongly marked the architectural, industrial, and commercial design of the Bauhaus.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

Mammon

“Mammon: An Aramaic word used in the New Testament of personify riches and worldliness; also, the god of avarice or cupidity. The word occurs in Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13 to represent the opposite of a God-fearing life: ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate one and love the other; or he will hold to one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ Both Spenser, with his cave of Mammon in The Faerie Queene, and Milton, by identifying him with Vulcan in Paradise Lost, make Mammon the epitome of the evils of wealth.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Denis Diderot on Skepticism

“Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.”

Denis Diderot

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Robert Maynard Hutchins on the Caprice of the Law

“The law may…depend on what the judge has had for breakfast.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins

“The Autobiography of an Ex-Law Student,” American Law School Review, Apr. 1934

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Noam Chomsky, Famously, on Grammar and Meaning

“The notion ‘grammatical’ cannot be identified with ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’ in any semantic sense. Sentences (1) and (2) are equally nonsensical, but…only the former is grammatical.

(1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

(2) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures ch. 2 (1957)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Cultural Literacy: Freudian Slip

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of the Freudian Slip. This is a half-page worksheet with a single-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. I cannot, for the life of me, remember why I wrote this. Usually, that means I put some together in response to student interest; that is all but certainly the case here.

This might be too abstract or advanced an idea for some students–and, depending on one’s thoughts about such things, it might also be a bit risque. I don’t know. I do know that it’s worth mentioning that there is a more clinical term for the Freudian Slip, to wit, parapraxis. This worksheet, as it is in Microsoft Word, could easily be recast to call upon students to understand the concept of parapraxis.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Christopher Lasch

Christopher Lasch: (1932-1994) American social critic and cultural historian. Lasch, a professor of history, is best known for his penetrating analyses of contemporary American cultural and political phenomena. In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), which became an unlikely best-seller, Lasch examined the effects of an increasingly self-centered worldview on the family and the community. He consistently challenged contemporary Americans’ reliance on experts to determine standards of behavior and thought. The Minimal Self (1984) examines individual freedom and privacy in the light of the agencies for social control in our lives. Lasch’s last work, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994), took its ironic title from Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses (1930) and argued that the greatest threat to democracy is now from a technocratic oligarchy at the top and not from revolution from below.

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

A Fortiori

“A Fortiori From the stronger: with greater reason, or being logically a more obvious truth if a preceding assertion is true; by inference; all the more so.

‘Marlow’s interrupting voice also deepens our admiration for Conrad’s narrative technique. That is, it is an artifice which intermittently calls attention to itself. So also, a fortiori, is the obtrusive and disjunctive surface treatment of Molly Bloom’s maundering mind.’ Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

Alfred Adler on Neurosis

“Every neurotic is partly in the right.”

Alfred Adler

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Cultural Literacy: Free Will

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of free will. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and three comprehension questions.

In other words, it barely introduces, and in no way does justice to, one of the big, big questions in philosophy and religion. But as an adjunct to a fictional allegory on protagonists with circumscribed lives? This might be a useful document. In any case, it is formatted (like most of the things you’ll find on this blog) in Microsoft Word, so it is open source and therefore yours to do with as you need or wish.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.