Arthur L. Herman | |
|---|---|
 Arthur Herman | |
| Born | c. 1956 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Minnesota (BA) Johns Hopkins University (MA, PhD) University of Edinburgh |
| Occupation | Philosophy professor |
| Known for | How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001) |
| Spouse | Beth Marla Warshofsky |
Arthur L. Herman (born 1956) is an American popular historian. He is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. [1]
Herman's father Arthur L. Herman, a scholar of Sanskrit, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Herman received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University. He spent a semester abroad at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland. [1] His 1984 dissertation research dealt with the political thought of early-17th-century French Huguenots. [2]
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Herman taught at Sewanee: The University of the South, George Mason University, Georgetown and The Catholic University of America. He was the founder and coordinator of the Western Heritage Program in the Smithsonian's Campus on the Mall lecture series. [3] [4]
His 2001 book on the Scottish Enlightenment, How the Scots Invented the Modern World , was a New York Times bestseller.
In 2008, he added to his body of work Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. [5]
In 1987, Herman married Beth Marla Warshofsky. [6] He lives in Washington, D.C. [7]
Herman generally employs the Great Man perspective in his work, which is 19th-century historical methodology attributing human events and their outcomes to the singular efforts of great men that has been refined and qualified by such modern thinkers as Sidney Hook.
He did not join the ranks of the so-called declinists after examining the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee, who expressed pessimism about the fate of the West, and remains cautiously optimistic about the future of the Western civilization. [8] [9]
He argues that after passing through the critical era of rapid geopolitical changes in the 20th century driven by an "ideological fervor to transform humanity and create a more perfect world order", the world finally entered in the 21st century into an era of relative stability "defined by the balance-of-power geopolitics." [10]
Herman advocates embracing the U.S. history in its entirety, including the American Civil War, rather than sanitizing it after the fact: "America is a country where the process of conflict and reconciliation, combined with the passage of time, brings out and embeds the qualities that make the United States one people and one community." [11]
Aristotle was an Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science.
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period.
Public speaking, also called oratory, is the act or skill of delivering speeches on a subject before a live audience.
Georgios Gemistos Plethon, commonly known as Gemistos Plethon, was a Greek scholar and one of the most renowned philosophers of the late Byzantine era. He was a chief pioneer of the revival of Greek scholarship in Western Europe. As revealed in his last literary work, the Nomoi or Book of Laws, which he circulated only among close friends, he rejected Christianity in favour of a return to the worship of the classical Hellenic gods, mixed with ancient wisdom based on Zoroaster and the Magi.
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, commonly known simply as Boethius, was a Roman senator, consul, magister officiorum, historian, and philosopher of the Early Middle Ages. He was a central figure in the translation of the Greek classics into Latin, a precursor to the Scholastic movement, and, along with Cassiodorus, one of the two leading Christian scholars of the 6th century. The local cult of Boethius in the Diocese of Pavia was sanctioned by the Sacred Congregation of Rites in 1883, confirming the diocese's custom of honouring him on the 23 October.
William James Durant was an American historian and philosopher, best known for his 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization, which contains and details the history of Eastern and Western civilizations. It was written in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy (1926), described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy".
Aristotelianism is a philosophical tradition inspired by the work of Aristotle, usually characterized by deductive logic and an analytic inductive method in the study of natural philosophy and metaphysics. It covers the treatment of the social sciences under a system of natural law. It answers why-questions by a scheme of four causes, including purpose or teleology, and emphasizes virtue ethics. Aristotle and his school wrote tractates on physics, biology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government. Any school of thought that takes one of Aristotle's distinctive positions as its starting point can be considered "Aristotelian" in the widest sense. This means that different Aristotelian theories may not have much in common as far as their actual content is concerned besides their shared reference to Aristotle.
"Form of the Good", or more literally "the idea of the good", is a concept in the philosophy of Plato. The definition of the Good is a perfect, eternal, and changeless Form, existing outside space and time. It is a Platonic ideal.
Mimesis is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including imitatio, imitation, nonsensuous similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act of expression, the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self.
In most contexts, the concept of good denotes the conduct that should be preferred when posed with a choice between possible actions. Good is generally considered to be the opposite of evil and is of ethics, morality, philosophy, and religion. The specific meaning and etymology of the term and its associated translations among ancient and contemporary languages show substantial variation in its inflection and meaning, depending on circumstances of place and history, or of philosophical or religious context.
Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature is the philosophical study of physics, that is, nature and the physical universe. It was dominant before the development of modern science.
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory. In this text Aristotle offers an account of ποιητική, which refers to poetry and more literally "the poetic art," deriving from the term for "poet; author; maker," ποιητής. Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama, lyric poetry, and epic. The genres all share the function of mimesis, or imitation of life, but differ in three ways that Aristotle describes:
Aristotle's Rhetoric is an ancient Greek treatise on the art of persuasion, dating from the 4th century BCE. The English title varies: typically it is Rhetoric, the Art of Rhetoric, On Rhetoric, or a Treatise on Rhetoric.
Social cycle theories are among the earliest social theories in sociology. Unlike the theory of social evolutionism, which views the evolution of society and human history as progressing in some new, unique direction(s), sociological cycle theory argues that events and stages of society and history generally repeat themselves in cycles. Such a theory does not necessarily imply that there cannot be any social progress. In the early theory of Sima Qian and the more recent theories of long-term ("secular") political-demographic cycles as well as in the Varnic theory of P.R. Sarkar, an explicit accounting is made of social progress.
John Herman Randall Jr. was an American philosopher, New Thought author, and educator.
Western culture, also known as Western civilization, European civilization, Occidental culture, or Western society, is an umbrella term which refers to the diverse heritages of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, artifacts and technologies of the Western world. Western civilization, broadly defined, finds its roots in the foundations laid by Greco-Roman civilization, and the tenets of Western Christianity. It has also been substantially influenced by societal influences from Germanic peoples. Whilst Western culture is a broad concept, and does not relate to a region with fixed members or geographical confines, it may relate to the cultures of countries with historical ties to a European country or a number of European countries, or the variety of cultures within Europe itself. However, countries toward the east of Europe are sometimes excluded from definitions of the Western world.
Neoplatonism is a version of Platonic philosophy that emerged in the 3rd century AD against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and religion. The term does not encapsulate a set of ideas as much as a series of thinkers. Among the common ideas it maintains is monism, the doctrine that all of reality can be derived from a single principle, "the One".
The Lyceum was a temple in Athens dedicated to Apollo Lyceus.
The theory of Forms, theory of Ideas, Platonic idealism, or Platonic realism is a philosophical theory of metaphysics developed by the Classical Greek philosopher Plato. The theory suggests that the physical world is not as real or true as "Forms". According to this theory, Forms—conventionally capitalized and also commonly translated as "Ideas"—are the non-physical, timeless, absolute, and unchangeable essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters of his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only objects of study that can provide knowledge. The theory itself is contested from within Plato's dialogues, and it is a general point of controversy in philosophy. Nonetheless, the theory is considered to be a classical solution to the problem of universals.
The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggles for the Soul of Western Civilization is the seventh non-fiction book written by American historian Arthur L. Herman. The book contrasts the philosophical approaches of Plato and Aristotle directly, then examines changes in political, religious, and philosophical views in western societies from the days of ancient Greece to the present in the context of their relationship to Platonic or Aristotelian viewpoints.
