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#Adorno quotes on optimism free

Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history) and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us.

For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance.Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972).Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.Epistemology Without A Knowing Subject (1967).The believer-whether animal or man-perishes with his false beliefs. Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead.In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.

(All that technology may say about ends is whether they are compatible with each other or realizable.)

Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.

As quoted in Freedom: A New Analysis (1954) by Maurice William Cranston, p.

I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence " democracy", and the other " tyranny".

You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government.

But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification - the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

#Adorno quotes on optimism free

The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong. We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve. Quotes If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. 1.6 Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976).1.5 Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963).1.2 The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).1.1 The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934).His political philosophy embraced ideas from major democratic political ideologies, including socialism/ social democracy, libertarianism/ classical liberalism and conservatism, and attempted to reconcile them. In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he believed made a flourishing open society possible. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".

According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. Sir Karl Raimund Popper ( 28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. This civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth - the transition from the tribal or "enclosed society," with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man.