and Moral Responsibility”, Harry Frankfurt attempts to falsify the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. The Principle of Alternate Possibilities is the principle where a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. A person would be morally responsible for their own actions if done by themselves. If someone else had forced that person to do the action, then the person doing the action is not morally responsible. Frankfurt does not believe this to be true
or her said action if they could have done otherwise. Although many can agree that this constitutes for an astounding contradiction to the development of morality and choice, I do not believe that Frankfurt’s response constitutes as a genuine counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. According to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities the issues that arise is whether there is a presence of freewill and the effect that freewill plays on morality. This idea of the Principle of
influential member of the Frankfurt School, which developed the notion of critical theory. Critical Theory is a sociological based theory of interpretation. That held that attempts to comprehend “society as a dialectical entity.” It rejects the notion through empiricism a true interpretation of society can be found. Instead it suggests that any interpretation of society needs to be interdisciplinary, taking into account “economics, psychology, history and philosophy.” The Frankfurt school would employ
“Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” is a chapter in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s book “Dialectic of Enlightenment” it goes onto discus the conflicts presented by the “culture industry.” Adorno states that the culture industry is a main phenomenon of late capitalism, encompassing all products from Hollywood films, to advertisements, and even extending to musical compositions. Adorno is very deliberate in noting the term “culture industry” over “mass culture” this was done
Relating to the Marxist perspectives of Adorno and Horkheimer, we can understand how the use of social networking as the medium explored in the film is tactical, in order to encourage larger audience profits. With Facebook having over a billion users, that ensures that over a billion people have an invested interest in that topic. Thus leading to a guarantee of a peeked interest surrounding the film. Critics also enjoyed the film and “received it with something close to ecstasy”(rollingstnoe). Perhaps
“American Culture” VS Intellectuals Geek- a performer that bites off a live chicken head for entertainment. Nowadays that is what the “American” culture refers its intellectuals as . Leonid Fridman the author of “America Needs Its Nerds” explains why our culture should stop casting out the academically great people in our society using different methods to demonstrating the effect of our influences have caused these intellectuals to struggle in more social situations. Fridman argues that they should
Interpretations The lover and critic of film, Susan Sontag, once said that, “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.” In her Essay, A Century of Cinema, she criticized the condition of today’s films. Her interpretation, was that recent cinema is tedious, unintelligent, and incredibly insignificant in comparison to older films. She touched on the history of cinema over the past one hundred years, giving credit to distinguished films and film-makers, and condemning the changes
cultural studies that were performed by the Frankfurt School were probably the first studies that ever addressed culture, their findings have not stood the test of time. One of the most important things to understand is that Marxism is generally a political body, while postmodernism is similar to a movement. Marxism has it's own views of culture that were developed through the Frankfurt School, but the movement of postmodernism disregards the Frankfurt school's theories. Postmodernism has in fact
From the beginning the women of “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell do not seem to have a significant role in the play. These women appear to just be along for the ride while their husbands do the dirty work of searching through the crime scene. In the end even though they serve as secondary characters to their husbands, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters play a large role in portraying the theme of this play, and without them the plot would not have been conducted nearly the same way to get the message out to
Have you ever been at home and still didn’t feel safe? Well, that’s how I felt in my own home sweet home. That was of course until I found a place to rest and relax in my hectic life- my home’s very own kitchen. Shortly after we moved in, the kitchen grew in to a sanctuary for me with every memory I’ve had in it. I think the kitchen is a relaxing place, is because for me it represents a place of symbolic, spiritual cleansing. The kitchen is usually dirty, and every few days I have to clean it. When
Grief and loss often trigger a desire for a change of lifestyle or a reflection on one’s current lifestyle, goals, and living purpose. This experience of misery gives the opportunity for improvement of one’s life and an appreciation for the previously unnoticed aspects of life. In the novella Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, the protagonist Mikage recovers from the grief and pain of the death of her family members and adopts an appreciation for the kitchen. Recovering from the recent loss of her grandmother
Marxist criticism concerns itself with class differences and the modes of production that produce oppression. Class conflict will be reflected in different forms of art because the marxist school believes that everything in a society is based on the current modes of production. A change to the mode of production will bring change to politics, law, philosophy, religion, and art. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin are three of the most notable critics of Marxism. They write about
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Germany during the Second World War, where they were exiled in America. Once there, they were exposed to American entertainment, and generated the now famous theory of the ‘culture industry’. The pair saw the media products of 1940s America as identical, all built around similar ideas with no individual creativity to distinguish them from one another. This is what constituted the culture industry, a production line in which media products are sent out one after
The culture that a society adopts, while seemingly innocent and thought to not play a factor into much of anything, ends up affecting every facet of the lives of its citizens. America has recently adopted a culture that is centered on money, and it’s this economic culture that has drastically changed the way work, education, and creativity is viewed by society and those who run it—or at least that is what F.S. Michaels argues in “Monoculture: How one story is changing everything.” One of his
What we find to be most enjoyable in life are what we recognised the most or what we are familiar with. These enjoyments with familiar objects leads to standardisation or in other words, the products obtain the form common to all commodities but it somehow converse its own sense of individuality, which leads to pseudo-individualisation. Pseudo-individualisation is a concept coined by German sociologist and philosopher Theodore W. Adorno. He is well known for his inquiry regarding “Culture Industry”
Nearly every Friday and Saturday night in middle school, my friends and I would have slumber parties, and ice cream were the main constituent. Before everyone arrives at my house, each person would bring a carton of ice cream, toppings of their choice, syrups, and whip cream. At some point or another in the night my friends and I would congregate around my kitchen table and make ice cream sundaes. We would make different types of sundaes: large, small, overloaded with toppings, and fruit. Throughout
chose to criticize feminism on a television series because I believe that this is a serious issue that is being debated all around the world today. The origins of the Critical Theory trace back to one of the first schools of thought known as the Frankfurt School founded in Germany in 1923 by a group of neo-Marxist theorists, which include Max Horkeimer, Herbert Marcuse and Lowenthal Friedrich Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Leo Lowenthal; these were some of the leading members of the
Philosopher Erich Fromm was born in the early 20th century and could witness all of its major developments (Cherry). Not only did it bring technological progress and new ideologies, but also bitter fruits of war unseen by mankind before. He contemplated the motives behind aggression and violence which led him to the study of psychology and sociology (Cherry). Fromm’s last work, “To Have or to Be” (1976), is the culmination of his strive to find and explain the purpose of human life. He perceived
Clockwork Orange and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction For Walter Benjamin, the defining characteristic of modernity was mass assembly and production of commodities, concomitant with this transformation of production is the destruction of tradition and the mode of experience which depends upon that tradition. While the destruction of tradition means the destruction of authenticity, of the originally, in that it also collapses the distance between art and the masses it makes possible the liberation
is repressed, man becomes mechanized. They also assert that class domination is a direct and inevitable consequence of the attempt to dominate nature, and is therefore inescapable. Background to the text. Adorno and Horkheimer, members of the Frankfurt school in Germany, wrote DoE (which was completed in 1944) while Fascism, a kind of barbarism never seen before, was threatening Europe. They viewed this as the epitome of the self-destructive nature of enlightenment, the final evidence that it would