This idea, in the avowed pantheism of Spinoza, was suffered to lapse during the 18th century, was revived again by Lessing and Herder, and became one of the central ideas of the great Romantic and Hegelian movements in Germany in the 19th century.
Under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, which came into force in 1997, physician-assisted suicide has accounted for between 0.06 and 0.14 percent of total deaths, or somewhere around 40 per year. The estimate for deaths in Britain,（ ）, is 650.
Plato’s Republic has been the source of great consternation, especially in literary circles, for its attack on the poets. Socrates in fact asserts that they should have no place in the ideal state. Eric Havelock suggests that there are several misunderstandings in this regard, and in his Preface to Plato he identifies the issues, and explains the historical context.Havelock opens his discussion by suggesting that the very title of the Republic is the source of much confusion. The book is commonly understood to be a treatise on the ideal political entity, but even a casual analysis will show that only one-third of the text is concerned with statecraft. The other two-thirds cover a variety of subjects, but the thrust of Plato’s argument amounts to an attack on the traditional Greek approach to education.The educational methods still in use in the 4th century BC had their origins in what has been called the Greek Dark Age beginning around 1200 BC when the Mycenaean era collapsed. Very little is known about the whys and wherefores of this collapse, but it wasn’t until around 700 BC that the Phoenician alphabet began to be adopted and used in the Greek-speaking world. During the intervening centuries, all knowledge concerning Greek history, culture, mores and laws were orally transmitted down through the generations. The most effective device in aid of memorizing vast amounts of information was rhyme. The epic form we see in Homer’s Iliad grew out of the need to preserve the Greek cultural memory. Havelock takes the reader through Book 1 of The Iliad and dissects it indetail to show how this cultural, historical and ethical heritage was conveyed. The Iliad takes on new and significant meaning to the reader of this minute examination.The Iliad and presumably other poetic vehicles were taught to children from an early age. The whole of the Greek-speaking world was immersed in the project of memorizing, and out of the masses arose those individuals with superior memories and theatrical skills who became the next generation of minstrels and teachers. Education was thus comprised of memorization and rote learning, and the people enjoyed constant reminders through public readings and festivals.Plato’s focus in the Republic and elsewhere is on Homer and Hesiod and to some extent the dramatists which at the time were the centerpieces of the educational regime. Their works presented gods and heroes as fundamentally immoral and thus bad examples for youth. The overall result is that the Greek adolescent is continually conditioned to an attitude which at bottom is cynical. It is more important to keep up appearances than to practice the reality. Decorum and decent behavior are not obviously violated,but the inner principle of morality is. Once the Republic is viewed as a critique of the educational regime, Havelock says that the logic of its total organization becomes clear.What Plato was railing against was an “oral state of mind” which seems to have persisted even though the alphabet and written documentation had been in use for three centuries. Illiteracy was thus still a widespread problem in Plato’s time, and the poetic state of mind was the main obstacle to scientific rationalism and analysis. This is why Plato regarded the poetic or oral state of mind as the arch-enemy. In his teachings he did the opposite. He asked his students to “think about what they were saying instead of just saying it. ’’ The epic had become, in Plato’s view,not “an act of creation but an act of reminder and recall” and contributed to what Havelock terms “the Homeric state of mind. ” It was Socrates’ project (and by extension Plato’s) to reform Greek education to encourage thinking and analysis. Thus all the ranting and railing about the “poets” in Plato’s Republic was limited basically to Homer and Hesiod because of what he viewed as a wholly inadequate approach to education of which these particular poets were an integral part.Unfortunately, Western culture has misconstrued what Plato and Socrates meant by “the poets”. And because we view poetry as a
[A]Less noted but [B]equally significant, the men and women who formed families between 1940 and 1960 [C]also reduced the divorce rate after a postwar peak; their marriages remained intact to a greater extent than [D]did those of couples who married in earlier as well as later decades.
The truth about alliances and their merit probably lies somewhere between the travel utopia presented by the players and the evil empires portrayed by their critics.
Translate the underlined sentences into good Chinese.
In every philosophical problem, our investigation starts from what may be called “data”，（1）by which I mean matters of common knowledge, vague, complex, inexact, as common knowledge always is, but yet somehow commanding our assent as on the whole and in some interpretation pretty certainly true. In the ease of our present problem, the common knowledge involved is of various kinds. There is first our acquaintance with particular objects of daily life — furniture, houses, towns, other people, and so on. Then there is the extension of such particular knowledge to particular things outside our personal experience through history and geography, newspapers, etc. And lastly, there is the systematization of all this knowledge of particulars by means of physical science, which derives immense persuasive force from its astonishing power of foretelling the future. We are quite willing to admit that there may be errors of detail in this knowledge,（2）but we believe them to be discoverable and corrigible by the methods which have given rise to our beliefs, and we do not, as practical men, entertain for a moment the hypothesis that the whole edifice may be built on insecure foundations. In the main, therefore, and without absolute dogmatism as to this or that special portion, we may accept this mass of common knowledge as affording data for our philosophical analysis.The first thing that appears when we begin to analyse our common knowledge is that some of it is derivative, while some is primitive;（3）that is to say, there is some that we only believe because of something else from which it has been inferred in some sense, though not necessarily in a strict logical sense, while other parts are believed on their own account, without the support of any outside evidence. It is obvious that the senses give knowledge of the latter kind: the immediate facts perceived by sight or touch or hearing do not need to be proved by argument, but are completely self-evident.（4）Psychologists, however, have made us aware that what is actually given in sense is much less than most people would naturally suppose, and that much of what at first sight seems to be given is really inferred. This applies especially in regard to our space-perceptions. For instance, we instinctively infer the “real” size and shape of a visible object from its apparent size and shape, according to its distance and our point of view. When we hear a person speaking, our actual sensations usually miss a great deal of what he says and we supply its place by unconscious inference; in a foreign language, where this process is more difficult, we find ourselves apparently grown dear; requiring, for example, to be much nearer the stage at a theater than would be necessary in our own country. Thus the first step in the analysis of data, namely, the discovery of what is really given in sense, is full of difficulty. We will, however, not linger on this point; so long as existence is realized, the exact outcome does not make any very great difference in our main problem.The next step in our analysis must be the consideration of how the derivative parts of our common knowledge arise. Here we become involved in a somewhat puzzling entanglement of logic and psychology. （5）Psychologically, a belief may be called derivative whenever it is caused by one or more other beliefs, or by some fact of sense which is not simply what the belief asserts. Derivative beliefs in this sense constantly arise without any process of logical inference, merely by association of ideas or some equally extra-logical process. From the expression of a man’s face we judge as to what he is feeling: we say we see that he is angry, when in fact we only see a frown. We do not judge as to his state of mind by any logical process: the judgment grows up, often without our being able to say what physical mark of emotion we actually saw. In such a case, the knowledge is derivative psychologically; but logically it is in a sense primitive, since it is not the result of any
