To: Borges
I didn't say they did or did not. Rather, I was attacking the urban legend that America was an upright and Puritanical nation until the mid-1960s. The Beatles were emblematic of that era. The rise of secular humanism and moral relativism had little to do with an English band but a lot to do with philosophers like John Dewey and William James and their popularizers in academia, as well as the influence of exiled leftist academics from Europe like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. The first successful battles of the "sexual revolution" were waged by people like Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey, whose heyday was in the musical era of Tin Pan Alley (Sanger) or the Big Bands (Kinsey).
To: Wallace T.
Not a fan of Pragmatism? :-) Do you dislike C.S. Pierce as well? His focus was more technical then moral I suppose. William James never gets his due as a huge influence on modern thought. They say he wrote philosophy as if it were fiction and his brother Henry wrote fiction as if it were philosophy.
267 posted on
01/23/2007 2:05:47 PM PST by
Borges
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