Isms Ologies 453 Difficult Doctrines Youve Always Pretended To Understand Goldwag by Goldwag, Arthur 9781847243508, 1847243509 instant download after payment.

Isms and ologies can serve as invaluable intellectual and social shorthand. When a philosopher declares himself to be a logical positivist, or a Christian identifies herself as a premillennial dispensationalist, at least their peers understand what they’re talking about. But as anyone who’s struggled through a humanities quarterly well knows, isms too often substitute for ideas or analysis; they are as likely to obfuscate as illuminate.

If you use isms and ologies as a reference, I hope you’ll find what you need. But treat my definitions with due caution—many of the topics 1 cover are worthy of an entire library in their own right. To paraphrase Shakespeare, there are more isms on heaven and earth than you could possibly dream of; ISMS & OLOGIES is merely the tip of the iceberg. While I have strived to maintain an unbiased tone, I am not without prejudices and opinions, and I’m sure that some of them are apparent. I apologize in advance to whomever I might offend.

In The Language Instinct (1994), the neuroscientist Steven Pinker suggested that certain human attributes and proclivities are encoded in the very structure of the brain. Among them, he speculates, is an intuitive sense of physics and biology that derives from an instinctive propensity to classify and taxonomize.

Our desire to organize vast tracts of undifferentiated emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and scientific terrain into neatly labeled counties, townships, boroughs, municipalities, villages, and lots, is as innately human as our capacity for open-ended wonder; our taste for order goes hand in hand with our attraction to mystery. The formulation of isms is something that people do—and something that they overdo as well; it’s also something they resist and resent. The more isms, the more schisms. Perhaps that’s the ultimate dialectic of human progress