Al Smith
Alfred Emanuel Smith was an American politician, elected Governor of New York four times and was the Democratic Party's candidate for President in 1928. Smith was the foremost urban leader of the Efficiency Movement in the United States and was noted for achieving a wide range of reforms as governor in the 1920s; the son of an Irish-American mother and a Civil War veteran father, he was raised in the Lower East Side of Manhattan near the Brooklyn Bridge, where he resided for his entire life. Like many other New York politicians of his era, he was linked to the notorious Tammany Hall political machine that controlled New York City's politics, although he remained untarnished by corruption. Smith was a strong opponent of Prohibition, which he did not think could be enforced, viewed it as an over-extension of the government's constitutional power, he was the first Catholic nominee for President. His candidacy mobilized Catholic votes from women, who had only received federal suffrage, it brought out the anti-Catholic vote, strong among white conservative Democrats in the South, although Smith was still successful within the states of the Deep South.
As a committed "wet" who opposed the prohibition laws, Smith attracted two groups: those who wanted their beer and liquor and did not like dealing with criminal bootleggers, those who were outraged that new criminal gangs had taken over the streets in most large and medium-sized cities. Many Protestants feared his candidacy, including German Lutherans and Southern Baptists, believing that the Pope in Rome would dictate his policies. Incumbent Republican Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was aided by national prosperity and the absence of American involvement in war. Four years Smith sought the 1932 nomination but was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, his former ally and successor as Governor of New York. Smith entered business in New York City, became involved in the construction and promotion of the Empire State Building, became an vocal opponent of Roosevelt's New Deal. Smith was born at 174 South Street, raised in the Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, his mother, was the daughter of Maria Marsh and Thomas Mulvihill, who were immigrants from County Westmeath, Ireland.
His father, Alfred Emanuele Ferraro, took the anglicized name Alfred E. Smith; the elder Alfred was the son of Italian and German immigrants. He served with the 11th New York Fire Zouaves in the opening months of the Civil War. Smith grew up with his family struggling financially in the Gilded Age; the Brooklyn Bridge was being constructed nearby. "The Brooklyn Bridge and I grew up together", Smith would recall. His four grandparents were Irish, German and Anglo-Irish, but Smith identified with the Irish-American community and became its leading spokesman in the 1920s, his father Alfred owned a small trucking firm, but died when the boy was 13. Aged 14, Smith had to drop out of St. James parochial school to help support the family, worked at a fish market for seven years. Prior to dropping out of school, he served as an altar boy, was influenced by the Catholic priests he worked with, he never attended high school or college, claimed he learned about people by studying them at the Fulton Fish Market, where he worked for $12 per week.
His acting skills made him a success on the amateur theater circuit. He became known, developed the smooth oratorical style that characterized his political career. On May 6, 1900, Al Smith married Catherine Ann Dunn, with whom he had five children. In his political career, Smith built on his working-class beginnings, identifying himself with immigrants and campaigning as a man of the people. Although indebted to the Tammany Hall political machine to its boss, "Silent" Charlie Murphy, he remained untarnished by corruption and worked for the passage of progressive legislation, it was during his early unofficial jobs with Tammany Hall that he gained renown as an excellent speaker. Smith's first political job was in 1895, as an investigator in the office of the Commissioner of Jurors as appointed by Tammany Hall. Smith was first elected to the New York State Assembly in 1904, was elected to office, serving through 1915. After being approached by Frances Perkins, an activist to improve labor practices, Smith sought to improve the conditions of factory workers.
He served as vice chairman of the state commission appointed to investigate factory conditions after 146 workers died in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Meeting the families of the deceased Triangle factory workers left a strong impression on him. Together with Perkins, Smith crusaded against dangerous and unhealthy workplace conditions and championed corrective legislation; the Commission was chaired by State Senator Robert F. Wagner and co-chaired by Smith, they held a series of publicized investigations around the state, interviewing 222 witnesses and taking 3500 pages of testimony. They hired field agents to do on-site inspections of factories. Starting with the issue of fire safety, they studied broader issues of the risks of injury in the factory environment, their findings led to thirty-eight new laws regulating labor in New York State, gave each of them a reputation as leading progressive reformers working on behalf of the working class. In the process, they changed Tammany's reputation from mere co
Social democracy
Social democracy is a political and economic ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal democratic polity and a capitalist economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution and regulation of the economy in the general interest and welfare state provisions. Social democracy thus aims to create the conditions for capitalism to lead to greater democratic and solidaristic outcomes. Due to longstanding governance by social democratic parties and their influence on socioeconomic policy development in the Nordic countries, in policy circles social democracy has become associated with the Nordic model in the latter part of the 20th century. Social democracy originated as a political ideology that advocated an evolutionary and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism using established political processes in contrast to the revolutionary approach to transition associated with orthodox Marxism.
In the early post-war era in Western Europe, social democratic parties rejected the Stalinist political and economic model current in the Soviet Union, committing themselves either to an alternative path to socialism or to a compromise between capitalism and socialism. In this period, social democrats embraced a mixed economy based on the predominance of private property, with only a minority of essential utilities and public services under public ownership; as a result, social democracy became associated with Keynesian economics, state interventionism and the welfare state while abandoning the prior goal of replacing the capitalist system with a qualitatively different socialist economic system. With the rise of popularity for neoliberalism and the New Right by the 1980s, most social democratic parties have incorporated Third Way ideology, which aims to fuse liberal economics with social democratic welfare policies. Modern social democracy is characterized by a commitment to policies aimed at curbing inequality, oppression of underprivileged groups and poverty, including support for universally accessible public services like care for the elderly, child care, health care and workers' compensation.
The social democratic movement has strong connections with the labour movement and trade unions which are supportive of collective bargaining rights for workers as well as measures to extend decision-making beyond politics into the economic sphere in the form of co-determination for employees and other economic stakeholders. During late 19th and early 20th centuries, social democracy was a movement that aimed to replace private ownership with social ownership of the means of production, taking influences from both Marxism and the supporters of Ferdinand Lassalle. By 1868–1869, Marxism had become the official theoretical basis of the first social democratic party established in Europe, the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany. In the early 20th century, the German social democratic politician Eduard Bernstein rejected the ideas in classical and orthodox Marxism that proposed a specific historical progression and revolution as a means to achieve social equality, advanced the position that socialism should be grounded in ethical and moral arguments for social justice and egalitarianism, was to be achieved through gradual legislative reform.
Influenced by Bernstein, following the split between reformists and revolutionary socialists in the Second International social democratic parties rejected revolutionary politics in favor of parliamentary reform while remaining committed to socialization. In this period, social democracy became associated with reformist socialism. Under the influence of politicians like Carlo Rosselli in Italy, social democrats began disassociating themselves from Marxism altogether and embraced liberal socialism, appealing to morality instead of any consistent systematic, scientific or materialist worldview. Social democracy made appeals to communitarian and sometimes nationalist sentiments while rejecting the economic and technological determinism characteristic of both Marxism and economic liberalism. By the post-World War II period, most social democrats in Europe had abandoned their ideological connection to Marxism and shifted their emphasis toward social policy reform in place of transition from capitalism to socialism.
The origins of social democracy have been traced to the 1860s, with the rise of the first major working-class party in Europe, the General German Workers' Association founded by Ferdinand Lassalle. 1864 saw the founding of the International Workingmen's Association known as the First International. It brought together socialists of various stances and occasioned a conflict between Karl Marx and the anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin over the role of the state in socialism, with Bakunin rejecting any role for the state. Another issue in the First International was the role of reformism. Although Lassalle was not a Marxist, he was influenced by the theories of Marx and Friedrich Engels and he accepted the existence and importance of class struggle. However, unlike Marx's and Engels's The Communist Manifesto, Lassalle promoted class struggle in a more moderate form. While Marx viewed the state negatively as an instrument of class rule that should only exist temporarily upon the rise to power of the proletariat and dismantled, Lassalle accepted the state.
Lassalle viewed the state as a means through which workers could enhance their interests and transform the society to create an economy based on worker-run cooperatives. Lassalle's strategy was electoral and reformist, with Lassalleans contending that the working c
Sustainable development
Sustainable development is the organizing principle for meeting human development goals while at the same time sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services upon which the economy and society depend. The desired result is a state of society where living conditions and resource use continue to meet human needs without undermining the integrity and stability of the natural system. Sustainable development can be classified as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations. While the modern concept of sustainable development is derived from the 1987 Brundtland Report, it is rooted in earlier ideas about sustainable forest management and twentieth century environmental concerns; as the concept developed, it has shifted to focus more on economic development, social development and environmental protection for future generations. It has been suggested that "the term'sustainability' should be viewed as humanity's target goal of human-ecosystem equilibrium, while'sustainable development' refers to the holistic approach and temporal processes that lead us to the end point of sustainability".
Modern economies are endeavouring to reconcile ambitious economic development and obligations of preserving natural resources and ecosystems, as the two are seen as of conflicting nature. Instead of holding climate change commitments and other sustainability measures as a drug to economic development and leveraging them into market opportunities will do greater good; the economic development brought by such organized principles and practices in an economy is called Managed Sustainable Development. The concept of sustainable development has been—and still is—subject to criticism, including the question of what is to be sustained in sustainable development, it has been argued that there is no such thing as a sustainable use of a non-renewable resource, since any positive rate of exploitation will lead to the exhaustion of earth's finite stock. It has been argued that the meaning of the concept has opportunistically been stretched from'conservation management' to'economic development', that the Brundtland Report promoted nothing but a business as usual strategy for world development, with an ambiguous and insubstantial concept attached as a public relations slogan.
Sustainability can be defined as the practice of maintaining processes of productivity indefinitely—natural or human made—by replacing resources used with resources of equal or greater value without degrading or endangering natural biotic systems. Sustainable development ties together concern for the carrying capacity of natural systems with the social and economic challenges faced by humanity. Sustainability science is the study of the concepts of sustainable development and environmental science. There is an additional focus on the present generations' responsibility to regenerate and improve planetary resources for use by future generations. Sustainable development has its roots in ideas about sustainable forest management which were developed in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. In response to a growing awareness of the depletion of timber resources in England, John Evelyn argued that "sowing and planting of trees had to be regarded as a national duty of every landowner, in order to stop the destructive over-exploitation of natural resources" in his 1662 essay Sylva.
In 1713 Hans Carl von Carlowitz, a senior mining administrator in the service of Elector Frederick Augustus I of Saxony published Sylvicultura oeconomica, a 400-page work on forestry. Building upon the ideas of Evelyn and French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, von Carlowitz developed the concept of managing forests for sustained yield, his work influenced others, including Alexander von Humboldt and Georg Ludwig Hartig leading to the development of a science of forestry. This in turn influenced people like Gifford Pinchot, first head of the US Forest Service, whose approach to forest management was driven by the idea of wise use of resources, Aldo Leopold whose land ethic was influential in the development of the environmental movement in the 1960s. Following the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, the developing environmental movement drew attention to the relationship between economic growth and development and environmental degradation. Kenneth E. Boulding in his influential 1966 essay The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth identified the need for the economic system to fit itself to the ecological system with its limited pools of resources.
One of the first uses of the term sustainable in the contemporary sense was by the Club of Rome in 1972 in its classic report on the Limits to Growth, written by a group of scientists led by Dennis and Donella Meadows of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Describing the desirable "state of global equilibrium", the authors wrote: "We are searching for a model output that represents a world system, sustainable without sudden and uncontrolled collapse and capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people."Following the Club of Rome report, an MIT research group prepared ten days of hearings on "Growth and Its Implication for the Future" for the US Congress, the first hearings held on sustainable development. William Flynn Martin, David Dodson Gray, Elizabeth Gray prepared the hearings under the Chairmanship of Congressman John Dingell. In 1980 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature published a world conservation strategy that included one of the first references to sustainable development as a global priority and introduced the
Robert M. La Follette
Robert Marion La Follette Sr. was an American lawyer and politician. He served as the Governor of Wisconsin. A Republican for most of his career, he ran for President of the United States as the nominee of his own Progressive Party in the 1924 presidential election. Historian John D. Buenker describes La Follette as "the most celebrated figure in Wisconsin history." Born and raised in Wisconsin, La Follette won election as the Dane County District Attorney in 1880. Four years he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he was friendly with party leaders like William McKinley. After losing his seat in the 1890 election, La Follette embraced progressivism and built up a coalition of disaffected Republicans, he sought election as governor in 1898 before winning the 1900 gubernatorial election. As governor of Wisconsin, La Follette compiled a progressive record, implementing primary elections and tax reform. La Follette won re-election in 1902 and 1904, but in 1905 the legislature elected him to the United States Senate.
He emerged as a national progressive leader in the Senate clashing with conservatives like Nelson Aldrich. He supported President William Howard Taft but broke with Taft after the latter failed to push a reduction in tariff rates, he challenged Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in the 1912 presidential election, but his candidacy was overshadowed by that of former President Theodore Roosevelt. La Follette's refusal to support Roosevelt alienated many progressives, though La Follette continued to serve in the Senate, he lost his stature as the leader of that chamber's progressive Republicans. La Follette supported some of President Woodrow Wilson's policies, but he broke with the president over foreign policy. During World War I, La Follette was one of the most outspoken opponents of the administration's domestic and international policies. With the Republican Party and the Democratic Party each nominating conservative candidates in the 1924 presidential election, left-wing groups coalesced behind La Follette's third-party candidacy.
With the support of the Socialist Party, farmer's groups, labor unions, others, La Follette appeared to be a serious threat to unseat Republican President Calvin Coolidge. La Follette stated that his chief goal was to break the "combined power of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people," and he called for government ownership of railroads and electric utilities, cheap credit for farmers, the outlawing of child labor, stronger laws to help labor unions, protections for civil liberties, his diverse coalition proved challenging to manage, the Republicans rallied to claim victory in the 1924 election. La Follette won 16.6% of the popular vote, one of the best third party performances in U. S. history. He died shortly after the presidential election, but his sons, Robert M. La Follette Jr. and Philip La Follette, succeeded him as progressive leaders in Wisconsin. Robert La Follette was born on a farm in Primrose, Wisconsin, on June 14, 1855, he was the youngest of five children born to Josiah La Follette and Mary Ferguson, who had settled in Wisconsin in 1850.
Josiah descended from French Huguenots. Josiah died less than a year after Robert was born, in 1862 Mary married John Saxton, a wealthy, seventy-year old merchant. La Follette's poor relationship with Saxton made for a difficult childhood. Though his mother was a Democrat, La Follette became, like most of his neighbors, a member of the Republican Party. La Follette began attending school at the age of four, though he worked on the family farm. After Saxton died in 1872, La Follette, his mother, his older sister moved to the nearby town of Madison. La Follette began attending the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1875 and graduated in 1879, he was a mediocre student, but established a student newspaper. He was influenced by the university's president, John Bascom, on issues of morality and social justice. During his time at the university, he became a vegetarian, declaring that his diet gave him more energy and a clear head. La Follette met Belle Case while attending the University of Wisconsin, they married on December 31, 1881, at her family home in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
She became a leader in the feminist movement, an advocate of women's suffrage and an important influence on the development of La Follette's ideas. La Follette was admitted to the state bar association in 1880; that same year, he won election as the district attorney for Dane County, beginning a long career in politics. He became a protege of George E. Bryant, a wealthy Republican Party businessman and landowner from Madison. In 1884, he won election to the United States House of Representatives, becoming the youngest member of the subsequent 49th Congress, his political views were broadly in line with those of other Northern Republicans at the time. He did, however stray from the wishes of party leaders, as he voted for the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, he denounced racial discrimination in the Southern United States and favored the Lodge Bill, which would have provided federal protections against the mass disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South.
At 35 years old, La Follette lost his seat in the 1890 Democratic landslide. Several factors contributed to his loss, including a compulsory-education bill passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature in 1889; because the law required major subjects in schools to be taught in En
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century, the "Century of Philosophy". Some consider Descartes' 1637 statement "I think" to have sparked the period. Others cite the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. French historians traditionally date the Enlightenment from 1715 to 1789, from the beginning of the reign of Louis XV until the French Revolution. Most end it with the turn of the 19th century. Philosophers and scientists of the period circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffeehouses and in printed books and pamphlets; the ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Church and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment; the Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, toleration, constitutional government and separation of church and state.
In France, the central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism, along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy—an attitude captured by the phrase Sapere aude; the Age of Enlightenment was preceded by and associated with the scientific revolution. Earlier philosophers whose work influenced the Enlightenment included Bacon, Descartes and Spinoza; the major figures of the Enlightenment included Beccaria, Hume, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire. Some European rulers, including Catherine II of Russia, Joseph II of Austria and Frederick II of Prussia, tried to apply Enlightenment thought on religious and political tolerance, which became known as enlightened absolutism. Benjamin Franklin visited Europe and contributed to the scientific and political debates there and brought the newest ideas back to Philadelphia.
Thomas Jefferson followed European ideas and incorporated some of the ideals of the Enlightenment into the Declaration of Independence. One of his peers, James Madison, incorporated these ideals into the United States Constitution during its framing in 1787; the most influential publication of the Enlightenment was the Encyclopédie. Published between 1751 and 1772 in thirty-five volumes, it was compiled by Diderot, d'Alembert and a team of 150 scientists and philosophers, it helped spread the ideas of the Enlightenment across Europe and beyond. Other landmark publications were Voltaire's Dictionnaire Letters on the English; the ideas of the Enlightenment played a major role in inspiring the French Revolution, which began in 1789. After the Revolution, the Enlightenment was followed by the intellectual movement known as Romanticism. René Descartes' rationalist philosophy laid the foundation for enlightenment thinking, his attempt to construct the sciences on a secure metaphysical foundation was not as successful as his method of doubt applied in philosophic areas leading to a dualistic doctrine of mind and matter.
His skepticism was refined by John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and David Hume's writings in the 1740s. His dualism was challenged by Spinoza's uncompromising assertion of the unity of matter in his Tractatus and Ethics; these laid down two distinct lines of Enlightenment thought: first, the moderate variety, following Descartes and Christian Wolff, which sought accommodation between reform and the traditional systems of power and faith, second, the radical enlightenment, inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza, advocating democracy, individual liberty, freedom of expression and eradication of religious authority. The moderate variety tended to be deistic, whereas the radical tendency separated the basis of morality from theology. Both lines of thought were opposed by a conservative Counter-Enlightenment, which sought a return to faith. In the mid-18th century, Paris became the center of an explosion of philosophic and scientific activity challenging traditional doctrines and dogmas.
The philosophic movement was led by Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for a society based upon reason as in ancient Greece rather than faith and Catholic doctrine, for a new civil order based on natural law, for science based on experiments and observation. The political philosopher Montesquieu introduced the idea of a separation of powers in a government, a concept, enthusiastically adopted by the authors of the United States Constitution. While the Philosophes of the French Enlightenment were not revolutionaries and many were members of the nobility, their ideas played an important part in undermining the legitimacy of the Old Regime and shaping the French Revolution. Francis Hutcheson, a moral philosopher, described the utilitarian and consequentialist principle that virtue is that which provides, in his words, "the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers". Much of what is incorporated in the scientific method
Jane Addams
Jane Addams, known as the mother of social work, was a pioneer American settlement activist/reformer, social worker, public philosopher, public administrator, protester and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She co-founded one of America's most famous settlement houses. In 1920, she was a co-founder for the ACLU. In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States, she is being recognized as a member of the American pragmatist school of philosophy, is known by many as the first woman "public philosopher in the history of the United States". In the Progressive Era, when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers, she helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, world peace. In her essay "Utilization of Women in City Government," Addams noted the connection between the workings of government and the household, stating that many departments of government, such as sanitation and the schooling of children, could be traced back to traditional women's roles in the private sphere.
Thus, these were matters of which women would have more knowledge than men, so women needed the vote to best voice their opinions. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively. Addams became a role model for middle-class women. Born in Cedarville, Jane Addams was the youngest of eight children born into a prosperous northern Illinois family of English-American descent which traced back to colonial Pennsylvania. Three of her siblings died in infancy, another died at age 16, leaving only four by the time Addams was age eight, her mother, Sarah Addams, died while pregnant with her ninth child in 1863 when Jane was two years old. Jane Addams was cared for by her older sisters after 1863. Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading indoors, attending Sunday school; when she was four she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, known as Potts's disease, which caused a curvature in her spine and lifelong health problems.
This made it complicated as a child to function with the other children, considering she had a limp and could not run as well. As a child, she thought she was "ugly" and remembered wanting not to embarrass her father, when he was dressed in his Sunday best, by walking down the street with him. Addams adored her father, John H. Addams, when she was a child, as she made clear in the stories of her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House, he was a founding member of the Illinois Republican Party, served as an Illinois State Senator, supported his friend Abraham Lincoln in his candidacies, for senator and the presidency. John Addams kept a letter from Lincoln in his desk, Jane Addams loved to look at it as a child, her father was an agricultural businessman with large timber and agricultural holdings. He was the president of The Second National Bank of Freeport, he remarried in 1868. His second wife was the widow of a miller in Freeport. During her childhood, Addams had big dreams—to do something useful in the world.
Interested in the poor from her reading of Dickens and inspired by her mother's kindness to the Cedarville poor, she decided to become a doctor so that she could live and work among the poor. It was a vague idea, she was a voracious reader. Addams's father encouraged her to pursue higher education but close to home, she was eager to attend the new college for Smith College in Massachusetts. After graduating from Rockford in 1881, with a collegiate certificate and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, she still hoped to attend Smith to earn a proper B. A; that summer, her father died unexpectedly from a sudden case of appendicitis. Each child inherited $50,000; that fall, her sister Alice, Alice's husband Harry, their stepmother, Anna Haldeman Addams, moved to Philadelphia so that the three young people could pursue medical educations. Harry was trained in medicine and did further studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Jane and Alice completed their first year of medical school at the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia, but Jane's health problems, a spinal operation and a nervous breakdown, prevented her from completing the degree.
She was filled with sadness at her failure. Stepmother Anna was ill, so the entire family canceled their plans to stay two years and returned to Cedarville; the following fall her brother-in-law/step brother Harry performed surgery on her back, to straighten it. He advised that she not pursue studies but, travel. In August 1883, she set off for a two-year tour of Europe with her stepmother, traveling some of the time with friends and family who joined them. Addams decided. Upon her return home in June 1887, she lived with her stepmother in Cedarville and spent winters with her in Baltimore. Addams, still filled with vague ambition, sank into depression, unsure of her future and feeling useless leading the conventional life expected of a well-to-do young woman, she wrote long letters to her friend from R
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was an influential German philosopher. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, he argued that space and causation are mere sensibilities. In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience, with all human experience sharing certain structural features, he drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposition that worldly objects can be intuited a priori, that intuition is therefore independent from objective reality. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arise from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's views continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy the fields of epistemology, political theory, post-modern aesthetics. In one of Kant's major works, the Critique of Pure Reason, he attempted to explain the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond the failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. Kant wanted to put an end to an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume.
Kant regarded himself as showing the way past the impasse between rationalists and empiricists which philosophy had led to, is held to have synthesized both traditions in his thought. Kant was an exponent of the idea that perpetual peace could be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation, he believed that this would be the eventual outcome of universal history, although it is not rationally planned. The nature of Kant's religious ideas continues to be the subject of philosophical dispute, with viewpoints ranging from the impression that he was an initial advocate of atheism who at some point developed an ontological argument for God, to more critical treatments epitomized by Nietzsche, who claimed that Kant had "theologian blood" and was a sophisticated apologist for traditional Christian faith. Kant published other important works on ethics, law, aesthetics and history; these include the Universal Natural History, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Judgment, which looks at aesthetics and teleology.
Kant's mother, Anna Regina Reuter, was born in Königsberg to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant, was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city. Kant believed. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal line was Scottish and it is more that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantwaggen and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children. Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized Emanuel, he changed his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew, he was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict and disciplinary, focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained Christian ideals for some time, but struggled to reconcile the faith with his belief in science.
In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic. Common myths about Kant's personal mannerisms are listed and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, it is held that Kant lived a strict and disciplined life, leading to an oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seemed to have a rewarding social life — he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author before starting on his major philosophical works, he had a circle of friends with whom he met, among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg.
A common myth is. In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor in Groß-Arnsdorf. Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age, he first attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, he studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen, a rationalist, familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind", he dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th cent
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