SEXY PALIN ? Who is Sarah Palin?

SEXY PALIN ?

Who is Sarah Palin?

Sarah Palin, a former runner-up in the Miss Alaska beauty contest, burst on to the political scene in 2006 by becoming both the first female and youngest governor in Alaskan history at the age of 42.She had previously gained statewide attention as a gutsy maverick unafraid to speak truth after whistleblowing on ethical violations by state Republican Party leaders during her time on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.A "soccer-mom" type with telegenic appeal, Mrs Palin is a real life Miss Congeniality - she won the title in the Wasilla beauty pageant back in 1984.But the mother-of-five combines her homely air with a keen grasp of the issues and a formidable campaigning style.

strong social conservative and a staunch supporter of gun rights, she is hugely popular in Alaska - a poll published last month showed her approval rating at 80 per cent.Mrs Palin is strongly pro-life - typified, observers say, by the fact that her fifth child, born in April, has Down's Syndrome. The Palins also have teenage son, Track, and three young daughters, Bristol, Willow, and Piper.She also opposes same-sex marriage, but has often sympathised with the concerns of gay community about discrimination and has implemented legislation ensuring equal benefits for same-sex couples.After running her gubernatorial campaign on clean government, Mrs Palin has successfully pushed through an ethics Bill as well as shelving pork-barrel projects supported by fellow Republicans. She is a spending hawk, having slashed the state's construction budget by $237 million - the largest cuts in Alaskan history.After taking office, she followed through on a campaign promise to sell a Windward II jet purchased on state credit. Placing it on eBay three times, she eventually sold it to the highest bidder for $2.7 million.Mrs Palin's energy stance dovetails nicely with that of Mr McCain - promoting resource development while also taking steps to address climate change and environmental issues. She has recently announced plans to create a new sub-cabinet group of advisers, tasked with reducing greenhouse gas emissions within Alaska.However, Mrs Palin is not entirely free of scandal. She is currently under investigation by the state legislature for possible abuse of power surrounding the dismissal of the commissioner for public safety, Walter Moneghan. Mr Moneghan alleges that he was fired because he was reluctant to sack a state trooper who was involved in a bitter divorce and custody battle with her sister, Molly McCann. The governor is said to be co-operating with the investigation, which is being overseen by Democratic State Senator Hollis French.An Alaskan through and through, Mrs Palin grew up with a love of traditional outdoor pursuits. As a child she regularly got up before dawn to go moose-hunting with her father and is still a strong believer in gun ownership. She is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association.Before entering politics she had a number of unconventional jobs including sports reporter and commercial fisherman, the latter alongside her husband Ted, who is a Yupik Innuit.

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Jean Jacques Rousseau Biography

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Jean Jacques Rousseau , 1712-78, Swiss-French philosopher, author, political theorist, and composer.

Life and Works

Rousseau was born at Geneva, the son of a Calvinist watchmaker. His mother died shortly after his birth, his father abandoned him about a decade later, and his upbringing was haphazard. At 16 he set out on a wandering, irregular life that brought him into contact (c.1728) with Louise de Warens, who became his patron and later his lover. She arranged for his trip to Turin, where he became an unenthusiastic Roman Catholic convert. After serving as a footman in a powerful family, he left Turin and spent most of the next dozen years at Chambéry, Savoy, with his patron. In 1742 he went to Paris to make his fortune with a new system of musical notation, but the venture failed. Once in Paris, however, he became an intimate of the circle of Denis Diderot (to whose Encyclopédie Rousseau contributed music articles), Melchior Grimm , and Mme d' Épinay . At this time also began his liaison with Thérèse Le Vasseur, a semiliterate servant who became his common-law wife. In 1749, Rousseau won first prize in a contest, held by the Academy of Dijon, on the question: "Has the progress of the sciences and arts contributed to the corruption or to the improvement of human conduct?" Rousseau took the negative stand, contending that humanity was good by nature and had been fully corrupted by civilization. His essay made him both famous and controversial. Although it is still widely believed that all of Rousseau's philosophy was based on his call for a return to nature, this view is an oversimplification, caused by the excessive importance attached to this first essay. A second philosophical essay, Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité des hommes (1754), is one of Rousseau's most mature and daring productions. After its publication, Rousseau returned to Geneva, reverted to Protestantism in order to regain his citizenship, and returned to Paris with the title "citizen of Geneva." Mme d'Épinay lent him a cottage, the Hermitage, on her estate at Montmorency. But Rousseau began to quarrel with Mme d'Épinay, Diderot, and Grimm, all of whom he accused of complicity in a sordid plot against him, and left the Hermitage to become the guest of the tolerant duc de Luxembourg, whose château was also at Montmorency. There he finished his novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), written in part under the influence of his love for Mme d'Houdetot, the sister-in-law of Mme d'Épinay; his Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), a diatribe against the suggestion that Geneva would be better off for having a theater; his Du contrat social (1762); and his Émile (1762), which offended both the French and Genevan ecclesiastic authorities and was burned at Paris and at Geneva. Rousseau, with the connivance of highly placed friends, escaped, however, to the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel, then a Prussian possession. His house was stoned, and Rousseau fled once more, this time to the canton of Bern, settling on the small island of Saint-Pierre, in the Lake of Biel. In 1765 he was expelled from Bern and accepted the invitation of David Hume to live at his house in England; there he began to write the first part of his Confessions, but after a year he quarreled violently with Hume, whom he believed to be in league with Diderot and Grimm, and returned to France (1767). His suspicion of people deepened and became a persecution mania. After wandering through the provinces, he finally settled (1770) at Paris, where he lived in a garret and copied music. The French authorities left him undisturbed, while curious foreigners flocked to see the famous man and be insulted by him. At the same time he went from salon to salon, reading his Confessions aloud. In his last years he began Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, descriptions of nature and his feeling about it, which was unfinished at the time of his death. Shortly before his death Rousseau moved to the house of a protector at Ermenonville, near Paris, where he died. In 1794 his remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris.

Rousseau's Thought

Few people have equaled Rousseau's influence in politics, literature, and education. His political thought is contained in Du contrat social, but it must be supplemented by other works, notably the Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité and his drafts of constitutions for Corsica and for Poland. Rousseau is fundamentally a moralist rather than a metaphysician. As a moralist, he is also, unavoidably, a political theorist. His thought begins with the assumption that we are by nature good, and with the observation that in society we are not good. The fall of humanity was, for Rousseau, a social occurrence. "But human nature does not go backward, and we never return to the times of innocence and equality, when we have once departed from them." Although he locates the cause of our deformity in society, Rousseau is not a primitivist. In Émile and Du contrat social, he proposed, on an individual and a social level, what might be done. What was new and important about his educational philosophy, as outlined in Émile, was its rejection of the traditional ideal: education was not seen to be the imparting of all things to be known to the uncouth child; rather it was seen as the "drawing out" of what is already there, the fostering of what is native. Rousseau's educational proposal is highly artificial, the process is carefully timed and controlled, but with the end of allowing the free development of human potential. Similarly, with regard to the social order, Rousseau's aim is freedom, which again does not involve a retreat to primitivism but perfect submission of the individual to what he termed the general will. The general will is what rational people would choose for the common good. Freedom, then, is obedience to a self-imposed law of reason, self-imposed because imposed by the natural laws of humanity's being. The purpose of civil law and government, of whatever form, is to bring about a coincidence of the general will and the wishes of the people. Society gives government its sovereignty when it forms the social contract to achieve liberty and well-being as a group. While this sovereignty may be delegated in various ways (as in a monarchy, a republic, or a democracy) it cannot be transferred and resides ultimately with society as a whole, with the people, who can withdraw it when necessary. Rousseau's political philosophy assumes that there really is a common good, and that the general will is not merely an ideal, but can, under the right conditions, be actual. And it is under such conditions, with the rule of the general will, that Rousseau sees our full development taking place, when "the advantages of a state of nature would be combined with the advantages of social life." Because he had such faith in the existence of the common good and the rightness of the general will, Rousseau was extreme in the sanctions he was willing to allow for its achievement: "If anyone, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: He has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law." Finally, Rousseau advocates a civil religion. Rousseau's thought sometimes rings of Calvinist Geneva, even though he reacted against its vision of humanity and had his books burned by its ecclesiastic authorities. In its time his epistolary novel Héloïse was immensely popular, but it is scarcely read today, while the Confessions remains widely read. Proposing to describe not only his life, but also his innermost thought and feelings, hiding nothing be it ever so shameful, Rousseau followed the model of St. Augustine 's Confession, but he created a new, intensely personal style of autobiography. The Héloïse, Émile, the Confessions, and the Rêveries all transfer to the domain of literature Rousseau's longing for a closeness with nature. His sensitive awareness apprehended the subtle influences of landscape, trees, water, birds, and other aspects of nature on the shifting state of the human soul. Rousseau was the father of Romantic sensibility; the trend existed before him, but he was the first to give it full expression. Rousseau's style, in all his writings, is always personal, sometimes bizarre, sometimes rhetorical, sometimes bitterly sarcastic, sometimes deliberately plebeian, and often animated by a tender and musical quality unequaled in French prose. Although self-taught, he possessed a thorough knowledge of musical theory, but his compositions exerted no direct influence on music.

Rousseau's influence

On posterity has been equaled by only a few, and it is by no means spent. His influence on German and English romanticism —and thus, indirectly, on romanticism in general—is difficult to overestimate. In addition, men as diverse as Immanuel Kant , Johann Goethe , Maximilien de Robespierre , Johann Pestalozzi , and Leo Tolstoy have been his disciples. His doctrine of popular sovereignty had a profound impact on French revolutionary thought. Although he did not advocate collective ownership, his ideas also had their effect on socialist thought. It is probably more correct to say that he anticipated rather than influenced many insights of modern social psychology.

Bibliography See biographies by F. C. Green (1955, repr. 1970), J. Guéhenno (2 vol., tr. 1966), L. G. Crocker (2 vol., 1968-73), and L. Damrosch (2005); I. Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (2d ed. 1947, repr. 1965); E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau (tr. 1963); A. Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (2d ed. 1964); J. MacDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution, 1762-1791 (1965); W. Blanchard, Rousseau and the Spirit of Revolt (1967); R. D. Masters, Political Philosophy of Rousseau (1968); J. Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (1970); R. Grimsley, The Philosophy of Rousseau (1973).

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Ths Law and Facts, hosted by Professor of Law Alexander Racini ( this film dedicated to France) Jean Jacques Rousseau

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What is the Philosophy?

What is the Philosophy?

philosophy [Gr.,=love of wisdom], study of the ultimate reality, causes, and principles underlying being and thinking. It has many aspects and different manifestations according to the problems involved and the method of approach and emphasis used by the individual philosopher. This article deals with the nature and development of Western philosophical thought. Eastern philosophy, while founded in religion, contains rigorously developed systems; for these, see Buddhism ; Confucianism ; Hinduism ; Islam ; Jainism ; Shinto ; Taoism ; Vedanta ; and related articles.

Distinguishing Characteristics

This search for truth began, in the Western world, when the Greeks first established (c.600 BC) inquiry independent of theological creeds. Philosophy is distinguished from theology in that philosophy rejects dogma and deals with speculation rather than faith. Philosophy differs from science in that both the natural and the social sciences base their theories wholly on established fact, whereas philosophy also covers areas of inquiry where no facts as such are available. Originally, science as such did not exist and philosophy covered the entire field, but as facts became available and tentative certainties emerged, the sciences broke away from metaphysical speculation to pursue their different aims. Thus physics was once in the realm of philosophy, and it was only in the early 20th cent. that psychology was established as a science apart from philosophy. However, many of the greatest philosophers were also scientists, and philosophy still considers the methods (as opposed to the materials) of science as its province.

Branches

Philosophy is traditionally divided into several branches. Metaphysics inquires into the nature and ultimate significance of the universe. Logic is concerned with the laws of valid reasoning. Epistemology investigates the nature of knowledge and the process of knowing. Ethics deals with problems of right conduct. Aesthetics attempts to determine the nature of beauty and the criteria of artistic judgment. Within metaphysics a division is made according to fundamental principles. The three major positions are idealism, which maintains that what is real is in the form of thought rather than matter; materialism, which considers matter and the motion of matter as the universal reality; and dualism, which gives thought and matter equal status. Naturalism and positivism are forms of materialism.

The History of Philosophy

Historically, philosophy falls into three large periods: classical (Greek and Roman) philosophy, which was concerned with the ultimate nature of reality and the problem of virtue in a political context; medieval philosophy, which in the West is virtually inseparable from early Christian thought; and, beginning with the Renaissance, modern philosophy, whose main direction has been epistemology.

Classical Philosophy

The first Greek philosophers, the Milesian school in the early 6th cent. BC, consisting of Thales , Anaximander , and Anaximenes , were concerned with finding the one natural element underlying all nature and being. They were followed by Heraclitus , Pythagoras , Parmenides , Leucippus , Empedocles , Anaxagoras , and Democritus , who took divergent paths in exploring the same problem. Socrates was the first to inquire also into social and political problems and was the first to use the dialectical method. His speculations were carried on by his pupil Plato , and by Plato's pupil Aristotle , at the Academy in Athens. Roman philosophy was based mainly on the later schools of Greek philosophy, such as the Sophists , the Cynics , Stoicism , and epicureanism . In late antiquity, Neoplatonism , chiefly represented by Plotinus , became the leading philosophical movement and profoundly affected the early development of Christian theology. Arab thinkers, notably Avicenna and Averroës , preserved Greek philosophy, especially Aristotelianism, during the period when these teachings were forgotten in Europe.

The Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century

Scholasticism, the high achievement of medieval philosophy, was based on Aristotelian principles. St. Thomas Aquinas was the foremost of the schoolmen, just as St. Augustine was the earlier spokesman for the church of pure belief. The Renaissance , with its new physics, astronomy, and humanism, revolutionized philosophic thought. René Descartes is considered the founder of modern philosophy because of his attempt to give the new science a philosophic basis. The other great rationalist systems of the 17th cent., especially those of Baruch Spinoza and G. W. von Leibniz , were developed in response to problems raised by Cartesian philosophy and the new science. In England empiricism prevailed in the work of Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , and David Hume , as well as that of George Berkeley , who was the outstanding idealist. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant achieved a synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist traditions and was in turn developed in the direction of idealism by J. G. Fichte , F. W. J. von Schelling , and G. W. F. Hegel . The romantic movement of the 18th cent. had its beginnings in the philosophy of J. J. Rousseau ; its adherents of the 19th cent. included Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche , as well as the American transcendentalists represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson . Opposed to the romanticists was the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx . The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin profoundly affected mid-19th-century thought. Ethical philosophy culminated in England in the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and in France in the positivism of Auguste Comte . Pragmatism , the first essentially American philosophical movement, was founded at the end of the 19th cent. by C. S. Peirce and was later elaborated by William James and John Dewey .

The Twentieth Century

The transition to 20th-century philosophy essentially came with Henri Bergson . The century has often seen a great disparity in orientation between Continental and Anglo-American thinkers. In France and Germany, major philosophical movements have been the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the existentialism of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre . Positivism and science have come under the scrutiny of Jürgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School ; he has argued that they are driven by hidden interests. Structuralism , a powerful intellectual movement throughout the first half of the 20th cent., defined language and social systems in terms of the relationships among their elements. Beginning in the 1960s arguments against all of Western metaphysics were marshaled by poststructuralists; among the most influential has been Jacques Derrida , a wide-ranging philosopher who has pursued deconstruction , a program that seeks to identify metaphysical assumptions in literature and psychology as well as philosophy. Both structuralism and poststructuralism originated mostly in France but soon came to influence thinkers throughout the West, especially in Germany and the United States. Major concerns in American and British philosophy in the 20th cent. have included formal logic, the philosophy of science , and epistemology. Leading early figures included G. E. Moore , Bertrand Russell , and Ludwig Wittgenstein ; Anglo-American philosophy was later exemplified by logical positivists like Rudolph Carnap . In their close attention to problems of language, the logical positivists, influenced by Wittgenstein, in turn influenced the work of W. V. O. Quine and others in the philosophy of language. Later Anglo-American philosophers turned increasingly toward ethics and political philosophy, as in John Rawls ' work on the problem of justice.

Bibliography See W. Windelband, A History of Philosophy (2d ed. 1901, repr. 1968); B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (rev. ed. 1961); W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy (3 vol., 1962-69); A. H. Armstrong, ed., The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (1966); J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (2d ed. 1966) and Recent Philosophers (1985); A. Wedberg, A History of Philosophy (3 vol., 1982-84); F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy (9 vol., 1985); D. W. Hamlyn, A History of Western Philosophy (1987); R. Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (1995); E. Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998); P. Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy (tr. 2002).Author not available, PHILOSOPHY., The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2008

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What is the Philosophy of Science?

Philosophy of science:

Branch of philosophy that emerged as an autonomous discipline in the 19th cent., especially through the work of Auguste Comte , J. S. Mill , and William Whewell. Several of the issues in philosophy of science concern science in general. David Hume raised a problem of induction , namely that of the grounds people have for believing that past generalizations, i.e., scientific laws, will be valid in the future. Sir Karl Popper and Nelson Goodman have made influential contributions to issues concerning induction in science. Another issue centers around the relations of scientific theories to the interpretation of the world. An additional general issue concerns the way science develops. Contemporary philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn have denied the thesis of the logical positivists (see logical positivism ) that scientists choose between competing theories in a purely rational fashion, i.e., by appealing to theory-neutral observations. The philosophy of science also focuses on issues raised by the relations between individual sciences and by individual sciences themselves. An example of the former is the issue of whether the laws of one science, e.g., biology, can be reduced to those of a supposedly more fundamental one, e.g., physics. An example of the latter sort of issue is that of the implications of quantum mechanics for our understanding of causality . Bibliography: See R. Boyd et al., ed., The Philosophy of Science (1991).

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