Hidden agenda meaning5/18/2023 ![]() For example, virtues are a mean everyday courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness but one irreducible, irrefutable exception is that there exists a heroic courage which is not a mean.Īristotle had use for all four of the "levels of interaction between the process and content of culture" that I have found it useful to distinguish not only the casuistic level of application to cases, but above that, the synthesis of working principles, then the relatively free critique of accepted principles (but still constrained to be applicable), and finally the top level of speculative thought and belief, free of all obligation of applicability or justification. The target metaphor does not mean an objective in the shape of a compilation of casuistic variations, but a universal principle. When his plan leads him to contrast Aristotle with the quest for universal principles (75-76), Toulmin tags him as a pluralist in the sense of regarding his predecessors' conclusions as "true for their situation." Actually, Aristotle collected philosophers' views and public opinion on each question in order first to refute those that proved untenable and then to formulate the general principle that emerged, in his spirit of "εχντυνλανω" if (with the subjunctive!) I hit the target. The result is often the omission of important features, a kind of omission which he criticizes, on page 200, as a fault of the Modernity he wants to supersede. For the sake of this satisfaction he tends to reduce thinkers and periods to tags. What for him "makes inquiry come to an end with satisfaction"-Suzanne Langer's essential question-is to draw dyadic contrasts. The "hidden agenda," hardly revealed here for the first time, is a synthesis of the physical, the mental, and the moral for example, relating rationality to emotions, medicine to ethics and a similar synthesis of the sociopolitical functions best served by national, subnational, or supranational institutions, plus the private organizations that are free to criticize public policies.īut the author's habit of mind is the opposite of synthesis. But as an account of the history of Western ideas, placing science and philosophy in their sociocultural context, the book's value lies in its staking out of the challenge rather than in its response to it. This is a book full of informative commentary, particularly on the history of science, the author's focus of expertise. These characteristics are attributed, with good reason, to the dominant movement in 17th-century Britain and France, which Toulmin calls Modernity, or sometimes, a second phase of Modernity between a Renaissance phase and a phase now emerging, both characterized by uncertainty and pluralism. Macmillan (The Free Press), 1990 228 pp.Ĭosmopolis is a mentality and a social order characterized by the quest for certainty and system, and by the assumption that fresh thought can start from a clean slate free of conditioning by one's cultural background. Review: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
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