Word: priori
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...attempt to do so in my piece. I did attempt, however, to expose some of the philosophical assumptions and value-judgements implicit in the study of how genes affect human behavior and society. Not simply judgments about the ultimate value of science--which most scientists seem to accept a priori, forgetting that science arose merely as a means of satisfying basic human needs--but judgments about the necessity of a field of study that quite ostensibly sets out to study how behavior is restricted by our genes...
...having bandied these concepts about for so many years, Greene has gained a reputation for possessing a dose of profundity. Yet Greene's is a worldly wisdom that is never fully-earned. It is a posture of knowing pessimism that we are expected to take as an a priori supposition, and which Greene keeps us from questioning too deeply with his fleeting, almost cinematic prose; he gives a whiff of a deep thought and then moves quickly to another scene, another shot, before we have time to look for the source of the scent. In the place of any real...
Frye's faith in the imagination and his rejection of a priori beliefs suggest his liberal bias towards processes over ends. That bias is strikingly in evidence in two of the essays in Spiritus Mundi, both of which condemn student radicals of the 1960s for their attack on educational processes. In "The University and the Personal Life," Frye places student unrest in the tradition of American anarchism, categorizing it primarily as a religious quest rather than a social movement. What he objects to most is the anti-intellectualism of the protesters, their refusal to appeal to "reason or experience...
...working class cannot be asked for sacrifices when its largest representation in parliament, the Communist Party, is "excluded a priori from any say in government," he said...
...priori, sociobiological models do not necessarily imply a greater constriction of the possibilities for constructive social change than do "environmental" models proposed by cultural materialist writers such as Marvin Harris...