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Empiricism We commonly define empiricism to be the view that knowledge originates in experience and that science should, therefore, rely on observation and experimentation. When something that occurs in everyday life, instead of saying that it is because of religion, faith or some philosophy, empiricism states you should try to use science, observation and experimentation to figure out why the ocean produces waves. We start by guessing what we would observe if we could observe the phenomenon that we cant get to, which is to say that we create a theory of ita scenario purporting to show what is (or was) transpiring there. Then from our theory we reason out a prediction about something else that we can observe. We check the prediction by carrying out the relevant observation, and we revise the theory accordingly. Those observations should be collected carefully, for people are prone to errors in perception and judgment and memory. We cannot expect to rely on recollections of our mere impressions; our observations are just barely empirical. Care is also essential in the interpretation of observations, for they can be misleading. But careful observations collected systematically and interpreted prudently foster insights into this complex universe of oursinsights that can take us far beyond common sense, insights that have often proven experts wrong. Empiricism is the philosophical concept that experience, which is based on observation and experimentation, is the source of knowledge. According to empiricism, only the information that a person gathers with his or her senses should be used to make decisions, without regard to reason or to either religious or political teachings. Empiricism gained credibility with the rise of experimental science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it continues to be studied by many scientists today. Empiricists have included English philosopher John Locke (16321704), who asserted that there is no such thing as innate (having at birth) ideasthat the mind is born blank and all knowledge is derived from human experience. Another prominent empiricist, Irish clergyman George Berkeley (16851753), believed that nothing exists except through an individual's own perceptions, and that the mind of God makes possible the apparent existence of material objects. Scottish philosopher David Hume (17111776) expanded empiricism to the extreme of skepticism, asserting that human knowledge is restricted to the experience of ideas and impressions. Therefore it is impossible to state truth with absolute certainty. The philosophy that motivates and guides scientists, empiricism, can serve all of us well. Indeed, people collect and analyze observations in many walks of life: not only in the sciences but also in engineering, medicine, and agriculture; in human services; in business and industry; sometimes even in the humanities.

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Dionysian/Apollonian By analyzing Dionysian & Apollonian aspects, we gain insight into who we are and how we behave in this world. This discussion of what the humanities is all about leads us into how we discover how the humanities can work for us. We forge into the discovery of ourselves, by better understanding ourselves with the help of the Apollonian and Dionysian chapter. What helps bring peace and understanding helps form the ideal person what the text refers to as the infinite person. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher who defined the terms Apollonian and Dionysian: Apollo God of the Sun and Dionysus God of the Earth, of spring and. In terms of drama, Nietzsche says the conflict between emotion and reason, between Dionysus and Apollo, led to the great age of Greek Tragedy. Nietzsche considered the ideal person as one who maintained a balance between the opposites, drawing the strong points from each, and he believed both qualities were necessary. Having a characteristic of Apollonian signified reason, order, clarity, moderation, control, analysis, research, and ruleoriented. Dionysian set characteristics of passion, spontaneity, imagination, excess, frenzy, intuition, feeling, and faith and ritual. It is by those two art-sponsoring deities, Apollo and Dionysus that we are made to recognize the tremendous split, as regards both origins and objectives, between the plastic, Apollonian arts and the non-visual art of music inspired by Dionysus. The two creative tendencies developed alongside one another, usually in fierce opposition, each by its taunts forcing the other to more energetic production, both perpetuating in a discordant concord the agony which the term art but feebly denominates: until at last, by the thaumaturgy magic or miracle of a Hellenic act of will, the pair accepted the yoke of marriage and, in this condition, begot Attic tragedy, which exhibits the salient feature of both parents. Apollo is at once the god of all plastic powers and the soothsaying god. He who is etymologically the lucent one, the god of light, reigns also over the fair illusion of our inner world of fantasy. But the image of Apollo must incorporate that thin line which the dream image may not cross, under penalty of becoming pathological, of imposing itself on us as crass realty: a discreet limitation, a freedom from all extravagant urges, the sapient tranquility of the plastic god. His eye must be sun-like. Dionysian stirrings arise either through the influence of those narcotic potions of which all primitive races speak in their hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, which penetrates with joy the whole frame of nature. So stirred, the individual forgets himself completely. The chariot of Dionysus is bedecked with flowers and garlands; panthers and tigers stride beneath his yoke. His Apollonian

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consciousness was but a thin veil hiding from him the whole Dionysian realm. Our modern tragic vision is the Dionysian vision still, except that the visionary is now utterly lost, since there is no cosmic order to allow a return to the world for him who has dared stray beyond.

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Allegory We can define allegory as the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence. Allegories in the Euripides are commonly noticed. Medea's killing of her children is symbolic in several ways. First, the boys are a pretty clear representation of Medea and Jason's marriage, as they are the product of what was once a loving relationship. Medea feels like Jason has betrayed and soiled that marriage by taking a new wife, so she's out to destroy every last remnant of it. It's surprising she doesn't burn down the house, too. Instead, Medea satisfies herself with slaughtering her kids in the house where they were born, sacrificing them on the altar of revenge. The murder of the sons could also be a symbolic act of feminine revolt. Medea is put upon by the maledominated society around her banished by Creon, deserted by her husband. She could be seen as rebelling against the role of mother, in which women were often trapped. There's nothing wrong with being a mother; the problem comes when that's all you're allowed to be. Also, it's probably no coincidence that Medea's final act of revolution is to kill two young boys. You could interpret the murder as the destruction of the next generation of potential oppressors. In the end, the slaughter of Medea's sons seems to be a symbolic act of bloody resistance. Divine entities are often used in Greek drama for symbolic purposes. Indeed, the gods themselves are said to have been symbols of natural or emotional forces that were beyond human comprehension. Using the name of a god or a goddess would have brought up very specific meanings for the Athenian audience. In Medea, Euripides, like his contemporaries, invokes the names of the gods often. When Medea calls on the goddess to bless her revenge, she symbolically summons the energy of all women ever done wrong by men. In a way this elevates Medea's bloody deeds above the level of petty revenge. The duality between reality and appearance and the desire to find a permanent quality of the universe further preoccupied the minds of those engaged in philosophy far beyond the speculation of the pre-Socratic. Plato, for example, found the unchanging nature of things in eternal forms, a universe of ideas as independent and metaphysical realities, which are ideal blueprints of their ever-changing manifestations in the visible world. The ideas are at the same time separate from their unstable manifestations and immanent in them. In his allegory of the cave, Plato developed a model of the human condition in which he explicitly exploits the difference between reality and appearance and the limited possibility of humans gaining access to eternal ideas.

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Freudianism Freudianism discovers false consciousness, the will to power, and libido in direct reflexive knowledge of the self. Religious uses of this direct knowledge render it even more suspect. It is merely a projection of an ancient destiny both infantile and ancestral which returns in the conscious life of the individual like the repressed in the obsession neurotic. The kind of direct knowledge of the self that we find in the confessions is no longer credible to modernity; we must first make a detour through the unconscious to come to true self-knowledge. Sigmund Freud's theories enjoyed great popularity in the 1920s. Aspects of his work made their way into everyday conversation, journalism, and literature. Before his time, psychology had been overwhelmingly concerned with the intellect, regarding conscious perceptions and ideas as the fundamental factors of mental health. In opposition to this focus on the surface of the mind, Freud claimed that "subconscious" urges, desires, and inhibitions dominated human behavior. According to his theories, traumas suffered in childhood were often forgotten or "repressed" by the conscious mind only to dominate the subconscious, manifesting themselves in neurotic behavior or even serious mental illness. The practical goal of Freud's psychoanalytic method was to cure mental illness by discovering its hidden causes, which, when brought to the surface, could be addressed and resolved. Freud's dynamic psychology, which implies that reality lies off stage or out of consciousness, simultaneously offers a mode of interpretation, a research method for psychology, a form of psychotherapy, and a theory of society and social existence. Pointing to the evidence of wit, dreams, and so-called Freudian slips, he demonstrated that one could reveal coherence and significant meaning in aspects of human language and behavior previously considered meaningless. Using such analytic tools, Freud and his followers in many disciplines have decoded human culture. Freud also claims to show how humankind can ultimately socialize itself by recognizing the determining factors of its illusions and neuroses, by rationally investigating what motivates people to carry out certain acts to steal things, inflict pain upon themselves and others, paint this particular picture, or write that particular poem. In short, Freud's ultimate goal was to permit freedom through knowledge at the same time that he revealed how limited knowledge is and how consciousness always appears contaminated by factors that lie outside it Freudian theory and many extreme applications discuss Freud's influence in the 1920s, often make two points: that American intellectuals eagerly discussed psychoanalytic ideas and that Freudianism was popularly distorted to mean that sexual expression should exceed conventional limits to avoid the danger of neurotic repression.

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Industrialization Industrialization through innovation in manufacturing processes first started with the Industrial Revolution in the north-west and Midlands of England in the eighteenth century. It spread to Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. Most pre-industrial economies had standards of living not much above subsistence, among that the majority of the population were focused on producing their means of survival. For example, in medieval Europe, as much as 80% of the labor force was employed in subsistence agriculture. Some pre-industrial economies, such as classical Athens, had trade and commerce as significant factors, so native Greeks could enjoy wealth far beyond a sustenance standard of living through the use of slavery. Famines were frequent in most pre-industrial societies, although some, such as the Netherlands and England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Italian city states of the fifteenth century, the medieval Islamic Caliphate, and the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were able to escape the famine cycle through increasing trade and commercialization of the agricultural sector. It is estimated that during the seventeenth century Netherlands imported nearly 70% of its grain supply and in the fifth century BC Athens imported three quarters of its total food supply. An industrial revolution is the transformation of an economy based on agriculture, hand-manufacturing, and commerce (the principal sectors of preindustrial economies) into one dominated by mechanized manufacture. The first such revolution (known as the Industrial Revolution) occurred in Britain ca. 17501850. Industrialization spread to France and Belgium (toward the end of this period), then to Germany, the United States, and Japan (in the late nineteenth century). The first major industry of the Industrial Revolution was cotton textiles. (Textile, aka cloth or fabric, is produced by weaving thread, which is produced by spinning fiber.) The speed of textile production was increased many times over, first via clever hand-powered devices (e.g. the spinning jenny), then steampowered machines. Subsequent major industries included iron, weapons, chemicals, and furniture. The overall technological transformation enabled by industrialization can be summed up in two phases: the age of iron and steam (ca. 1750-1880) and the age of steel and electricity. Two critical American contributions to industrial production were interchangeable parts (invented by American arms manufacturers and the assembly line (developed by American meat-packing plants.) Both are nineteenth-century achievements.