title: Green Revolution in India

text: Farmer's financial issues have become especially apparent in Punjab, where its rural areas have witnessed an alarming rise in suicide rates. Excluding the countless unreported cases, there has been estimated to be a 51.97% increase in the number of suicides in Punjab in 1992–93, compared to the recorded 5.11% increase in the country as a whole. According to a 2019 Indian news report, indebtedness continues to be a grave issue affecting the people of Punjab today, demonstrated by the more than 900 recorded farmer committed suicide in Punjab in the last two years.


title: Green Revolution in India

text: Excessive and inappropriate use of fertilizers and pesticides polluted waterways and killed beneficial insects and wildlife. It has caused over-use of soil and rapidly depleted its nutrients. The rampant irrigation practices led to eventual soil degradation. Groundwater practices have fallen dramatically. Further, heavy dependence on few major crops has led to loss of biodiversity of farmers, and the increase of stubble burning cases since 1980. These problems were aggravated due to absence of training to use modern technology and vast illiteracy leading to excessive use of chemicals.


title: Green Revolution in India

text: The green revolution spread only in irrigated and high-potential rainfed areas. The villages or regions without the access of sufficient water were left out that widened the regional disparities between adopters and non-adopters. Since, the HYV seeds technically can be applied only in a land with assured water supply and availability of other inputs like chemicals, fertilizers etc. The application of the new technology in the dry-land areas is simply ruled out.


title: Green Revolution in India

text: The states like Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, etc. having good irrigation and other infrastructure facilities were able to derive the benefits of the green revolution and achieve faster economic development while other states have recorded slow growth in agriculture production.


title: Green Revolution in India

text: In the years since Green Revolution was adopted, issues of sustainability have come up due to the adverse environmental and social impacts. To meet this challenge other alternatives of farming have emerged like small subsistence farms, family homesteads, New Age communes, village and community farming collectives and women’s cooperatives with the common purpose of producing organically grown, chemical free food. In green revolution areas of the country increasing numbers of families are experimenting on their own with alternative systems of land management and the growing of crops. Building upon the idea of sustainable development, commercial models for large scale food production have been developed by integrating traditional farming systems with appropropriate energy efficient technology.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: The 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election took place on November 8, 2022, to elect the governor of Minnesota. Incumbent Democratic (DFL) Governor Tim Walz defeated the Republican nominee, former state senator Scott Jensen, winning a second term.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: In the end, Jensen's advantage in rural Greater Minnesota could not overcome Walz’s large lead in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. Despite this, this was the first time ever in Walz's career that he lost Minnesota's 1st congressional district, the district that he used to represent in Congress and prior to this election, carried seven times in a row. This election was also the first time ever that Walz failed to carry the following counties in any election that he's ran in, Freeborn County, Houston County, Mower County, and Winona County. Winona County was significant given the fact that President Joe Biden carried the county in 2020.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: With his win, Walz gave the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party its fourth consecutive gubernatorial victory, the most in the party’s history. Furthermore, the DFL held the State House and flipped the State Senate, gaining a trifecta for the first time since 2014.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: The caucuses took place on February 1, 2022, statewide. A caucus is a local meeting where all who intend to vote for the Republican Party are able to select their precinct leadership, participate in a straw poll for Governor, write and pass resolutions, and elect delegates to their local Basic Political Organizational Unit (BPOU). Those who were not elected as BPOU delegates could become alternates and fill in for delegates who cannot attend the BPOU convention.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: A BPOU has boundaries that are based on the County or State Senate District an individual resides in. The majority of these took place in March 2022. Elected delegates of each BPOU attended a convention relating to their district to vote on the resolutions passed at the caucus, complete party business, listen to candidates, and elect delegates for the State Convention and their corresponding U.S. House District convention.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: The Republican State Convention was held on May 13–14, 2022 in Rochester. 2,200 delegates were elected statewide to decide the endorsement of the Minnesota Republican Party all statewide offices. The endorsed candidate receives the backing of the Minnesota Republican Party, including money and resources, ahead of the August 9 primary. Only one Republican, incumbent Governor Arne Carlson in 1994, has won the primary without the party convention endorsement. (Two Democrats, Mark Dayton and Tim Walz, won the Democratic primary against endorsed candidates.)


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: At the convention, Scott Jensen won the endorsement with 65 percent of the vote on the ninth ballot, defeating Kendall Qualls. Mike Murphy, Paul Gazelka, and Neil Shah were all eliminated on earlier ballots. All of the candidates who contested the endorsement pledged to forego the primary if not endorsed.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: Rich Stanek, the only major candidate who did not compete for the endorsement, did not file for the primary, leaving Jensen without major opposition. He faces two minor candidates in the August primary.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: The central issues of this election were the economy, rising crime, Walz’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, education, and abortion access following the Supreme Court decision in overturning Roe v. Wade.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: Walz campaigned on his first-term accomplishments, such as middle class tax cuts, while making abortion rights a prominent focus of the campaign, and attacking Jensen on abortion and his COVID-19 skepticism. Jensen attacked Walz throughout the campaign; over his COVID-19 policies, crime in the Twin Cities, inflation and gas prices, and education performance.


title: 2022 Minnesota gubernatorial election

text: Jensen was criticized for promoting the hoax that schools provided litter boxes to students that identified as furries.


title: John Irving

text: John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American-Canadian novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.


title: John Irving

text: Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of "The World According to Garp" in 1978. Many of Irving's novels, including "The Hotel New Hampshire" (1981), "The Cider House Rules" (1985), "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (1989), and "A Widow for One Year" (1998), have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in the 72nd Academy Awards (1999) for his script of "The Cider House Rules".


title: John Irving

text: Five of his novels have been adapted into films ("Garp", "Hotel", "Meany", "Cider", "Widow"). Several of Irving's books ("Garp", "Meany", "Widow") and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in the town of Exeter, New Hampshire.


title: John Irving

text: Irving was born John Wallace Blunt Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (née Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt Sr., a writer and executive recruiter; but the couple separated during pregnancy. Irving grew up in Exeter with a stepfather, Colin Franklin Newell Irving, who was a Phillips Exeter Academy faculty member. His uncle Hammy Bissell was also part of the faculty. John Irving was in the Phillips Exeter wrestling program as a student athlete and as an assistant coach, and wrestling features prominently in his books, stories, and life. While a student at Exeter, Irving was taught by author and Christian theologian Frederick Buechner, whom he quoted in an epigraph in "A Prayer for Owen Meany". Irving has dyslexia.


title: John Irving

text: Irving's biological father, whom he never met, had been a pilot in the Army Air Forces and, during World War II, was shot down over Burma in July 1943, but survived. (The incident was incorporated into his novel "The Cider House Rules".) Irving did not find out about his father's heroism until 1981, when he was almost 40 years old.


title: John Irving

text: Irving's career began at the age of 26 with the publication of his first novel, "Setting Free the Bears" (1968). The novel was reasonably well reviewed but failed to gain a large readership. In the late 1960s, he studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His second and third novels, "The Water-Method Man" (1972) and "The 158-Pound Marriage" (1974), were similarly received. In 1975, Irving accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.


title: John Irving

text: Frustrated at the lack of promotion his novels were receiving from his first publisher, Random House, Irving offered his fourth novel, "The World According to Garp" (1978), to Dutton, which promised him stronger commitment to marketing. The novel became an international bestseller and cultural phenomenon. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 (which ultimately went to Tim O'Brien for "Going After Cacciato") and its first paperback edition won the Award the next year. "Garp" was later made into a film directed by George Roy Hill and starring Robin Williams in the title role and Glenn Close as his mother; it garnered several Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Close and John Lithgow. Irving makes a brief cameo appearance in the film as the referee in one of Garp's high school wrestling matches.


title: John Irving

text: "Garp" transformed Irving from an obscure, academic literary writer to a household name, and his subsequent books were bestsellers. The next was "The Hotel New Hampshire" (1981), which sold well despite mixed reviews from critics. Like "Garp", the novel was quickly made into a film, this time directed by Tony Richardson and starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges. "Interior Space", a short story originally published in "Fiction" magazine in 1980, later appeared in the 1981 O. Henry Prize Stories collection.


title: John Irving

text: In 1985, Irving published "The Cider House Rules". An epic set in a Maine orphanage, the novel's central topic is abortion. Many drew parallels between the novel and Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" (1838). Irving's next novel was "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (1989), another New England family epic about religion set in a New England boarding school and in Toronto, Ontario. The novel was influenced by "The Tin Drum" (1959) by Günter Grass, and the plot contains further allusions to "The Scarlet Letter" (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne and the works of Dickens. In "Owen Meany," Irving for the first time examined the consequences of the Vietnam War—particularly mandatory conscription, which Irving avoided because he was a married father when of age for the draft. "Owen Meany" became Irving's best selling book since "Garp."


title: John Irving

text: Irving returned to Random House for his next book, "A Son of the Circus" (1995). Arguably his most complicated and difficult book, and a departure from many of the themes and location settings in his previous novels, it was dismissed by critics but became a national bestseller on the strength of Irving's reputation for fashioning literate, engrossing page-turners. Irving returned in 1998 with "A Widow for One Year", which was named a "New York Times" Notable Book.


title: John Irving

text: In 1999, after nearly 10 years in development, Irving's screenplay for "The Cider House Rules" was made into a film directed by Lasse Hallström, starring Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Delroy Lindo. Irving also made a cameo appearance as the disapproving stationmaster. The film was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.


title: John Irving

text: Soon afterward, Irving wrote "My Movie Business", a memoir about his involvement in creating the film version of "The Cider House Rules". After its publication in 1999, Irving appeared on the CBC Television program "Hot Type" to promote the book. During the interview, Irving criticized bestselling American author Tom Wolfe, saying Wolfe "can't write", and that Wolfe's writing makes Irving gag. Wolfe appeared on "Hot Type" later that year, calling Irving, Norman Mailer, and John Updike his "three stooges" who were panicked by his newest novel, "A Man in Full" (1998).


title: John Irving

text: Irving's 10th book, "The Fourth Hand" (2001), also became a bestseller. In 2004, "A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound", a children's picture book originally included in "A Widow for One Year", was published with illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann. Irving's 11th novel, "Until I Find You", was released on July 12, 2005.


title: John Irving

text: On June 28, 2005, "The New York Times" published an article revealing that "Until I Find You" (2005) contains two specifically personal elements about his life that he had never before discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman, and the recent entrance in his life of his biological father's family.


title: John Irving

text: In his 12th novel, "Last Night in Twisted River", published in 2009, Irving's central character is a novelist with, as critic Boyd Tonkin puts it, "a career that teasingly follows Irving's own".


title: John Irving

text: Irving has had four novels reach number one on the bestseller list of "The New York Times": "The Hotel New Hampshire" (September 27, 1981), which stayed number one for seven weeks, and was in the top 15 for over 27 weeks; "The Cider House Rules" (June 16, 1985); "A Widow for One Year" (June 14, 1998); and "The Fourth Hand" (July 29, 2001).


title: John Irving

text: Since the publication of "Garp" made him independently wealthy, Irving has sporadically accepted short-term teaching positions (including one at his "alma mater", the Iowa Writers' Workshop) and served as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams. (Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame as an "Outstanding American" in 1992.) In addition to his novels, he has also published "Trying to Save Piggy Sneed" (1996), a collection of his writings including a brief memoir and unpublished short fiction, "My Movie Business", an account of the protracted process of bringing "The Cider House Rules" to the big screen, and "The Imaginary Girlfriend", a short memoir focusing on writing and wrestling. In 2010, Irving revealed that he and Tod "Kip" Williams, director and writer of "The Door in the Floor" (2004), were co-writing a screenplay for an adaptation of "A Widow for One Year" (1998).


title: John Irving

text: In 2002, his four most highly regarded novels, "The World According to Garp", "The Cider House Rules", "A Prayer for Owen Meany", and "A Widow for One Year", were published in Modern Library editions. "Owen Meany" was adapted into the 1998 film "Simon Birch" (Irving required that the title and character names be changed because the screenplay's story was "markedly different" from that of the novel; Irving is on record as having enjoyed the film, however). In 2004, a portion of "A Widow for One Year" was adapted into "The Door in the Floor", starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger.


title: John Irving

text: In a "New York Magazine" interview in 2009, Irving stated that he had begun work on a new novel, his 13th, based in part on a speech from Shakespeare's "Richard II." Simon & Schuster published the novel, titled "In One Person" (2012), taking over from Random House. "In One Person" has a first-person viewpoint, Irving's first such narrative since "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (Irving decided to change the first-person narrative of "Until I Find You" to third person less than a year before publication). "In One Person" features a 60-year-old, bisexual protagonist named William, looking back on his life in the 1950s and '60s. The novel shares a similar theme and concern with "The World According to Garp", which was Irving says, in part about "people who hate you for your sexual differences."


title: John Irving

text: He won a Lambda Literary Award in 2013 in the Bisexual Fiction category for "In One Person", and was also awarded the organization's Bridge Builder Award to honor him as an ally of the LGBT community.


title: John Irving

text: On June 10, 2013, Irving announced his next novel, his 14th, titled "Avenue of Mysteries", named after a street in Mexico City. In an interview the previous year, he had revealed the last line of the book: "Not every collision course comes as a surprise."


title: John Irving

text: On December 19, 2014, Irving posted a message on the Facebook page devoted to him and his work that he had "finished 'Avenue of Mysteries.' It is a shorter novel for me, comparable in length to 'In One Person.'" Irving speculated that "if everything remains on schedule, the English-language editions should be published in fall 2015." Simon & Schuster published the book in November, 2015.


title: John Irving

text: On November 3, 2015, Irving revealed that he'd been approached by HBO and Warner Brothers to reconstruct "The World According to Garp" as a miniseries. He described the project as being in the early stages.


title: John Irving

text: According to the byline of a self-penned, February 20, 2017 essay for The Hollywood Reporter, Irving completed his teleplay for the five-part series based on "The World According to Garp", and he is currently working on his fifteenth novel.


title: John Irving

text: On June 28, 2017, Irving revealed in a long letter to fans on Facebook that his new novel will be, primarily, a ghost story. "...I have a history of being interested in ghosts. And here come the ghosts again. In my new novel, my fifteenth, the ghosts are more prominent than before; the novel begins and ends with them. Like "A Widow for One Year", this novel is constructed as a play in three acts. I'm calling Act I 'Early Signs.' I began writing it on New Year's Eve—not a bad night to start a ghost story."


title: John Irving

text: On August 1, 2017, an update about Irving's fifteenth, in-progress, novel, was posted to his Facebook page: "It's been 45 years since John Irving published "The Water-Method Man". While his second novel is regarded as a purely comic tale, and John's current project is a darker contemplation of life's disruptive forces, the two novels bear some resemblance to one another. John Irving is once again experimenting with framed narratives and writing about the evolution of a writer—like Bogus Trumper, one who writes screenplays. This time, we see the main character—Adam Brewster—mature, from childhood and early adolescence, to become a writer like Garp, or Ruth Cole, or Juan Diego, as if writing were an inevitability given the fateful circumstances of his life. And, along the way, despite the darkness, there are points of humor. John's work in progress may ultimately be his funniest novel since "The Water-Method Man"."


title: John Irving

text: In an interview with Mike Kilen for "The Des Moines Register", published on October 26, 2017, Irving revealed that the title of his new novel-in-progress is "Darkness As a Bride". The title comes from lines in Shakespeare's play, "Measure for Measure:" "If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride, / and hug it in mine arms." He later changed the title to "The Last Chairlift".


title: John Irving

text: In July 2018, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize announced Irving would be the recipient of the 2018 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award at its annual gala October 28, 2018, in Dayton, Ohio.


title: John Irving

text: In 1964, Irving married Shyla Leary, whom he had met at Harvard in 1963 while taking a summer course in German, before traveling to Vienna with IES Abroad. They have two sons, Colin and Brendan. The couple divorced in the early 1980s. In 1987, he married Janet Turnbull, who had been his publisher at Bantam-Seal Books and is now one of his literary agents. They have a daughter, Eva Everett, born in 1991. Irving has homes in Vermont, Toronto, and Pointe au Baril. On December 13, 2019, Irving became a Canadian citizen, and plans to keep his US citizenship, commenting that he reserves the right to be outspoken about the United States and his dislike of Donald Trump, whom he referred to as vulgar, narcissistic, and xenophobic.


title: John Irving

text: In 2010, Irving confirmed that he is a second cousin of Amy Bishop, a former assistant professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who is serving a life sentence for shooting six colleagues, killing three, during a department meeting on February 12, 2010.


title: Western philosophy

text: Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word "philosophy" itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" , "to love" and σοφία "sophía", "wisdom").


title: Western philosophy

text: The scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics).


title: Western philosophy

text: The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology; the nature and origin of the universe, while rejecting mythical answers to such questions. They were specifically interested in the (the cause or first principle) of the world. The first recognized philosopher, Thales of Miletus (born in Ionia) identified water as the (claiming "all is water") His use of observation and reason to derive this conclusion is the reason for distinguishing him as the first philosopher. Thales' student Anaximander claimed that the was the "apeiron", the infinite. Following both Thales and Anaximander, Anaximenes of Miletus claimed that air was the most suitable candidate.


title: Western philosophy

text: Pythagoras (born ), from the island of Samos off the coast of Ionia, later lived in Croton in southern Italy (Magna Graecia). Pythagoreans hold that "all is number", giving "formal" accounts in contrast to the previous "material" of the Ionians. The discovery of consonant intervals in music by the group enabled the concept of "harmony" to be established in philosophy, which suggested that opposites could together give rise to new things. They also believed in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation.


title: Western philosophy

text: Parmenides argued that, unlike the other philosophers who believed the was transformed into multiple things, the world must be singular, unchanging and eternal, while anything suggesting the contrary was an illusion. Zeno of Elea formulated his famous paradoxes in order to support the Parmenides' views about the illusion of plurality and change (in terms of motion), by demonstrating them to be impossible. An alternative explanation was presented by Heraclitus, who claimed that everything was in flux all the time, famously pointing out that one could not step into the same river twice. Empedocles may have been an associate of both Parmenides and the Pythagoreans. He claimed the was in fact composed of multiple sources, giving rise to the model of the four classical elements. These in turn were acted upon by the forces of Love and Strife, creating the mixtures of elements which form the world. Another view of the being acted upon by an external force was presented by his older contemporary Anaxagoras, who claimed that "nous," the mind, was responsible for that. Leucippus and Democritus proposed atomism as an explanation for the fundamental nature of the universe. Jonathan Barnes called atomism "the culmination of early Greek thought".


title: Western philosophy

text: In addition to these philosophers, the Sophists comprised teachers of rhetoric who taught students to debate on any side of an issue. While as a group, they held no specific views, in general they promoted subjectivism and relativism. Protagoras, one of the most influential Sophist philosophers, claimed that "man is the measure of all things", suggesting there is no objective truth. This was also applied to issues of ethics, with Prodicus arguing that laws could not be taken seriously because they changed all the time, while Antiphon made the claim that conventional morality should only be followed when in society.


title: Western philosophy

text: The Classical period of ancient Greek philosophy centers on Socrates and the two generations of students following him.


title: Western philosophy

text: Socrates experienced a life-changing event when his friend, Chaerephon visited the Oracle of Delphi where the Pythia told him that no one in Athens was wiser than Socrates. Learning of this, Socrates subsequently spent much of his life questioning anyone in Athens who would engage him, in order to investigate the Pithia's claim. Socrates developed a critical approach, now called the Socratic method, to examine people's views. He focused on issues of human life: eudaimonia, justice, beauty, truth, and virtue. Although Socrates wrote nothing himself, two of his disciples, Plato and Xenophon, wrote about some of his conversations, although Plato also deployed Socrates as a fictional character in some of his dialogues. These Socratic dialogues display the Socratic method being applied to examine philosophical problems.


title: Western philosophy

text: Socrates's questioning earned him enemies who eventually accused him of impiety and corrupting the youth. The Athenian democracy tried him, was found guilty, and was sentenced to death. Although his friends offered to help him escape from prison, Socrates chose to remain in Athens and abide by his principles. His execution consisted of drinking poison hemlock. He died in 399 BCE.


title: Western philosophy

text: After Socrates' death, Plato founded the Platonic Academy and Platonic philosophy. As Socrates had done, Plato identified virtue with knowledge. This led him to questions of epistemology on what knowledge is and how it is acquired.


title: Western philosophy

text: Socrates had several other students who also founded schools of philosophy. Two of these were short-lived: the Eretrian school, founded by Phaedo of Elis, and the Megarian school, founded by Euclid of Megara. Two others were long-lasting: Cynicism, founded by Antisthenes, and Cyrenaicism, founded by Aristippus. The Cynics considered life's purpose to live in virtue, in agreement with nature, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, and fame, leading a simple life free from all possessions. The Cyrenaics promoted a philosophy nearly opposite that of the Cynics, endorsing hedonism, holding that pleasure was the supreme good, especially immediate gratifications; and that people could only know their own experiences, beyond that truth was unknowable.


title: Western philosophy

text: The final school of philosophy to be established during the Classical period was the Peripatetic school, founded by Plato's student, Aristotle. Aristotle wrote widely about topics of philosophical concern, including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, politics, and logic. Aristotelian logic was the first type of logic to attempt to categorize every valid syllogism. His epistemology comprised an early form empiricism. Aristotle criticized Plato's metaphysics as being poetic metaphor, with its greatest failing being the lack of an explanation for change. Aristotle proposed the four causes model to explain change - material, efficient, formal, and final - all of which were grounded on what Aristotle termed the "unmoved mover". His ethical views identified eudaimonia as the ultimate good, as it was good in itself. He thought that eudaimonia could be achieved by living according to human nature, which is to live with reason and virtue, defining "virtue" as the golden mean between extremes. Aristotle saw politics as the highest art, as all other pursuits are subservient to its goal of improving society. The state should aim to maximize the opportunities for the pursuit of reason and virtue through leisure, learning, and contemplation. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great, who conquered much of the ancient Western world. Hellenization and Aristotelian philosophy have exercised considerable influence on almost all subsequent Western and Middle Eastern philosophers.


title: Western philosophy

text: The Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods saw the continuation of Aristotelianism and Cynicism, and the emergence of new philosophies, including Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neopythagoreanism. Platonism also continued but came under new interpretations, particularly Academic skepticism in the Hellenistic period and Neoplatonism in the Imperial period. The traditions of Greek philosophy heavily influenced Roman philosophy. In Imperial times, Epicureanism and Stoicism were particularly popular.


title: Western philosophy

text: The various schools of philosophy proposed various and conflicting methods for attaining eudaimonia. For some schools, it was through internal means, such as calmness, "ataraxia" (ἀταραξία), or indifference, "apatheia" (ἀπάθεια), which was possibly caused by the increased insecurity of the era. The aim of the Cynics was to live according to nature and against convention with courage and self-control. This was directly inspiring to the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, who took up the Cynic ideals of steadfastness and self-discipline, but applied the concept of "apatheia" to personal circumstances rather than social norms, and switched shameless flouting of the latter for a resolute fulfillment of social duties. The ideal of 'living in accordance with nature' also continued, with this being seen as the way to "eudaimonia," which in this case was identified as the freedom from fears and desires and required choosing how to respond to external circumstances, as the quality of life was seen as based on one's beliefs about it. An alternative view was presented by the Cyrenaics and the Epicureans. The Cyrenaics were hedonists and believed that pleasure was the supreme good in life, especially physical pleasure, which they thought more intense and more desirable than mental pleasures. The followers of Epicurus also identified "the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain" as the ultimate goal of life, but noted that "We do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or of sensuality . . . we mean the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the mind". This brought hedonism back to the search for "ataraxia".Another important strand of thought in post-Classical Western thought was the question of skepticism. Pyrrho of Elis, a Democritean philosopher, traveled to India with Alexander the Great's army where Pyrrho was influenced by Buddhist teachings, most particularly the three marks of existence. After returning to Greece, Pyrrho started a new school of philosophy, Pyrrhonism, which taught that it is one's opinions about non-evident matters (i.e., dogma) that prevent one from attaining "ataraxia". To bring the mind to "ataraxia", Pyrrhonism uses "epoché" (suspension of judgment) regarding all non-evident propositions. After Arcesilaus became head of the Academy, he adopted skepticism as a central tenet of Platonism, making Platonism nearly the same as Pyrrhonism. After Arcesilaus, Academic skepticism diverged from Pyrrhonism. The Academic skeptics did not doubt the existence of truth; they just doubted that humans had the capacities for obtaining it. They based this position on Plato's "Phaedo", sections 64–67, in which Socrates discusses how knowledge is not accessible to mortals.


title: Western philosophy

text: Following the end of the skeptical period of the Academy with Antiochus of Ascalon, Platonic thought entered the period of Middle Platonism, which absorbed ideas from the Peripatetic and Stoic schools. More extreme syncretism was done by Numenius of Apamea, who combined it with Neopythagoreanism. Also affected by the Neopythagoreans, the Neoplatonists, first of them Plotinus, argued that mind exists before matter, and that the universe has a singular cause which must therefore be a single mind. As such, Neoplatonism become essentially a religion, and had much impact on later Christian thought.


title: Western philosophy

text: Medieval philosophy roughly extends from the Christianization of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance. It is defined partly by the rediscovery and further development of classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, and partly by the need to address theological problems and to integrate the then-widespread sacred doctrines of Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) with secular learning. Some problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason, the existence and unity of God, the object of theology and metaphysics, the problems of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation.


title: Western philosophy

text: A prominent figure of this period was Augustine of Hippo, one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity. Augustine adopted Plato's thought and Christianized it. His influence dominated medieval philosophy perhaps up to the end of era and the rediscovery of Aristotle's texts. Augustinianism was the preferred starting point for most philosophers up until the 13th century. Among the issues his philosophy touched upon were the problem of evil, just war and what time is. On the problem of evil, he argued that evil was a necessary product of human free will. When this raised the issue of the incompatibility of free will and divine foreknowledge, both he and Boethius solved the issue by arguing that God did not see the future, but rather stood outside of time entirely.


title: Western philosophy

text: An influential school of thought was that of scholasticism, which is not so much a philosophy or a theology as a methodology, as it places a strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference and to resolve contradictions. Scholastic thought is also known for rigorous conceptual analysis and the careful drawing of distinctions. In the classroom and in writing, it often takes the form of explicit disputation; a topic drawn from the tradition is broached in the form of a question, oppositional responses are given, a counterproposal is argued and oppositional arguments rebutted. Because of its emphasis on rigorous dialectical method, scholasticism was eventually applied to many other fields of study.


title: Western philosophy

text: Anselm of Canterbury (called the 'father of scholasticism') argued that the existence of God could be irrefutably proved with the logical conclusion apparent in the ontological argument, according to which God is by definition the greatest thing in conceivable, and since an existing thing is greater than a non-existing one, it must be that God exists or is not the greatest thing conceivable (the latter being by definition impossible). A refutation of this was offered by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, who applied the same logic to an imagined island, arguing that somewhere there must exist a perfect island using the same steps of reasoning (therefore leading to an absurd outcome).Boethius also worked on the problem of universals, arguing that they did not exist independently as claimed by Plato, but still believed, in line with Aristotle, that they existed in the substance of particular things. Another important figure for scholasticism, Peter Abelard, extended this to nominalism, which states (in complete opposition to Plato) that universals were in fact just names given to characteristics shared by particulars.Thomas Aquinas, an academic philosopher and the father of Thomism, was immensely influential in medieval Christendom. He was influenced by newly discovered Aristotle, and aimed to reconcile his philosophy with Christian theology. Aiming to develop an understanding of the soul, he was led to consider metaphysical questions of substance, matter, form, and change. He defined a material substance as the combination of an essence and accidental features, with the essence being a combination of matter and form, similar to the Aristotelian view. For humans, the soul is the essence. Also influenced by Plato, he saw the soul as unchangeable and independent of the body.


title: Western philosophy

text: Other Western philosophers from the Middle Ages include John Scotus Eriugena, Gilbert de la Porrée, Peter Lombard, Hildegard of Bingen, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Bonaventure, Peter John Olivi, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Robert Kilwardby, Albertus Magnus, Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, Marguerite Porete, Dante Alighieri, Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, Jean Buridan, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, Jean Gerson, and John Wycliffe. The medieval tradition of scholasticism continued to flourish as late as the 17th century, in figures such as Francisco Suárez and John of St. Thomas. During the Middle Ages, Western philosophy was also influenced by the Jewish philosophers Maimonides and Gersonides; and the Muslim philosophers Alkindus, Alfarabi, Alhazen, Avicenna, Algazel, Avempace, Abubacer, and Averroes.


title: Western philosophy

text: The Renaissance ("rebirth") was a period of transition between the Middle Ages and modern thought, in which the recovery of ancient Greek philosophical texts helped shift philosophical interests away from technical studies in logic, metaphysics, and theology towards eclectic inquiries into morality, philology, and mysticism. The study of the classics and the humane arts generally, such as history and literature, enjoyed a scholarly interest hitherto unknown in Christendom, a tendency referred to as humanism. Displacing the medieval interest in metaphysics and logic, the humanists followed Petrarch in making humanity and its virtues the focus of philosophy.


title: Western philosophy

text: At the point of passage from Renaissance into early/classical modern philosophy, the dialogue was used as a primary style of writing by Renaissance philosophers, such as Giordano Bruno.


title: Western philosophy

text: The term "modern philosophy" has multiple usages. For example, Thomas Hobbes is sometimes considered the first modern philosopher because he applied a systematic method to political philosophy. By contrast, René Descartes is often considered the first modern philosopher because he grounded his philosophy in problems of "knowledge", rather than problems of metaphysics.


title: Western philosophy

text: Modern philosophy and especially Enlightenment philosophy is distinguished by its increasing independence from traditional authorities such as the Church, academia, and Aristotelianism; a new focus on the foundations of knowledge and metaphysical system-building; and the emergence of modern physics out of natural philosophy.


title: Western philosophy

text: Some central topics of Western philosophy in its early modern (also classical modern) period include the nature of the mind and its relation to the body, the implications of the new natural sciences for traditional theological topics such as free will and God, and the emergence of a secular basis for moral and political philosophy. These trends first distinctively coalesce in Francis Bacon's call for a new, empirical program for expanding knowledge, and soon found massively influential form in the mechanical physics and rationalist metaphysics of René Descartes.


title: Western philosophy

text: Descartes's epistemology was based on a method called Cartesian doubt, whereby only the most certain belief could act as the foundation for further inquiry, with each step to further ideas being as cautious and clear as possible. This led him to his famous maxim "cogito ergo sum" ('I think, therefore I exist'), though similar arguments had been made by earlier philosophers. This became foundational for much of further Western philosophy, as the need to find a route from the private world of consciousness to the externally existing reality was widely accepted until the 20th century. A major issue for his thought remained in the mind–body problem, however. One solution to the problem was presented by Baruch Spinoza, who argued that the mind and the body are one substance. This was based on his view that God and the universe are one and the same, encompassing the totality of existence. In the other extreme, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, argued instead that the world was composed of numerous individual substances, called monads. Together, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz are considered influential early rationalists.


title: Western philosophy

text: In contrast to Descartes, Thomas Hobbes was a materialist who believed that everything was physical, and an empiricist who thought that all knowledge comes from sensation which is triggered by objects existing in the external world, with thought being a kind of computation. John Locke was another classic empiricist, with his arguments helping it overtake rationalism as the generally preferred approach. Together with David Hume, they form the core of 'British empiricism'. George Berkeley agreed with empiricism, but instead of believing in an ultimate reality which created perceptions, argued in favour immaterialism and the world existing as a result of being perceived. In contrast, the Cambridge Platonists continued to represent rationalism in Britain.


title: Western philosophy

text: In terms of political philosophy, arguments often started from arguing over the first principles of human nature through the thought experiment of what the world would look like without society, a scenario referred to as the state of nature. Hobbes believed that this would be a violent and anarchic, calling life under such a state of affairs "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". To prevent this, he believed that the sovereign of the state should have essentially unlimited power. In contrast, Locke believed the state of nature be one where individuals enjoyed freedom, but that some of that (excluding those covered by natural rights) had to be given up when forming a society, but not to the degree of absolute rule. Jean-Jacques Rousseau meanwhile argued that in nature people were living in a peaceful and comfortable state, and that the formation of society led to the rise of inequality.


title: Western philosophy

text: The approximate end of the early modern period is most often identified with Immanuel Kant's systematic attempt to limit metaphysics, justify scientific knowledge, and reconcile both of these with morality and freedom. Whereas the rationalists had believed that knowledge came from "a priori" reasoning, the empiricists had argued that it came from "a posteriori" sensory experience, Kant aimed to reconcile these views by arguing that the mind uses "a priori" understanding to interpret the "a posteriori" experiences. He had been inspired to take this approach by the philosophy of Hume, who argued that the mechanisms of the mind gave people the perception of cause and effect.


title: Western philosophy

text: Many other contributors were philosophers, scientists, medical doctors, and politicians. A short list includes Galileo Galilei, Pierre Gassendi, Blaise Pascal, Nicolas Malebranche, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, Christian Wolff, Montesquieu, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Reid, Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Adam Smith.


title: Western philosophy

text: German idealism emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s.


title: Western philosophy

text: Transcendental idealism, advocated by Immanuel Kant, is the view that there are limits on what can be understood since there is much that cannot be brought under the conditions of objective judgment. Kant wrote his "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781) in an attempt to reconcile the conflicting approaches of rationalism and empiricism, and to establish a new groundwork for studying metaphysics. Although Kant held that objective knowledge of the world required the mind to impose a conceptual or categorical framework on the stream of pure sensory data—a framework including space and time themselves—he maintained that things-in-themselves existed independently of human perceptions and judgments; he was therefore not an idealist in any simple sense. Kant's account of things-in-themselves is both controversial and highly complex. Continuing his work, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling dispensed with belief in the independent existence of the world, and created a thoroughgoing idealist philosophy.


title: Western philosophy

text: The most notable work of absolute idealism was G. W. F. Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit", of 1807. Hegel admitted his ideas were not new, but that all the previous philosophies had been incomplete. His goal was to correctly finish their job. Hegel asserts that the twin aims of philosophy are to account for the contradictions apparent in human experience (which arise, for instance, out of the supposed contradictions between "being" and "not being"), and also simultaneously to resolve and preserve these contradictions by showing their compatibility at a higher level of examination ("being" and "not being" are resolved with "becoming"). This program of acceptance and reconciliation of contradictions is known as the "Hegelian dialectic".


title: Western philosophy

text: Philosophers influenced by Hegel include Ludwig Feuerbach, who coined the term "projection" as pertaining to humans' inability to recognize anything in the external world without projecting qualities of ourselves upon those things; Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels; and the British idealists, notably T. H. Green, J. M. E. McTaggart, F. H. Bradley, and R. G. Collingwood.


title: Western philosophy

text: Few 20th-century philosophers embraced the core tenets of German idealism after the demise of British idealism. However, quite a few have embraced Hegelian dialectic, most notably Frankfurt School critical theorists, Alexandre Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre (in his "Critique of Dialectical Reason"), and Slavoj Žižek. A central theme of German idealism, the legitimacy of Kant's "Copernican revolution", remains an important point of contention in 21st-century post-continental philosophy.


title: Western philosophy

text: Late modern philosophy is usually considered to begin around the pivotal year of 1781, when Gotthold Ephraim Lessing died and Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" appeared. The 19th century saw the beginnings of what would later grow into the divide between Continental and analytic traditions of philosophy, with the former more interested in general frameworks of metaphysics (more common in the German-speaking world), and the latter focusing on issues of epistemology, ethics, law and politics (more common in the English-speaking world).


title: Western philosophy

text: German philosophy exercised broad influence in this century, owing in part to the dominance of the German university system. German idealists, such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the members of Jena Romanticism (Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel), transformed the work of Kant by maintaining that the world is constituted by a rational or mind-like process, and as such is entirely knowable.


title: Western philosophy

text: Hegel argued that history was the dialectical journey of the Geist (universal mind) towards self-fulfilment and self-realization. The Geist's self-awareness is absolute knowledge, which itself brings complete freedom. His philosophy was based on absolute idealism, with reality itself being mental. His legacy was divided between the conservative Right Hegelians and radical Young Hegelians, with the latter including David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach argued for a materialist conception of Hegel's thought, inspiring Karl Marx.Arthur Schopenhauer was inspired by Kant and Indian philosophy. Accepting Kant's division of the world into the noumenal (the real) and phenomenal (the apparent) realities, he nevertheless disagreed on the accessibility of former, arguing that it could in fact be accessed. The experience of will was how this reality was accessible, with the will underlying the whole of nature, with everything else being appearance. Whereas he believed the frustration of this will was the cause of suffering, Friedrich Nietzsche thought that the will to power was empowering, leading to growth and expansion, and therefore forming the basis of ethics.


title: Western philosophy

text: Jeremy Bentham established utilitarianism, which was a consequentialist ethic based on 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number', an idea taken from Cesare Beccaria. He believed that any act could be measured by its value in this regard through the application of felicific calculus. His associate James Mill's son John Stuart Mill subsequently took up his thought. However, in contrast to the valuation of pure pleasure in Bentham's work, Mill divided pleasures into higher and lower kinds.


title: Western philosophy

text: Logic began a period of its most significant advances since the inception of the discipline, as increasing mathematical precision opened entire fields of inference to formalization in the work of George Boole and Gottlob Frege. Other philosophers who initiated lines of thought that would continue to shape philosophy into the 20th century include:


title: Western philosophy

text: Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around 1870. It asserts that the truth of beliefs consists in their usefulness and efficacy rather than their correspondence with reality. Charles Sanders Peirce and William James were its co-founders and it was later modified by John Dewey as instrumentalism. Since the usefulness of any belief at any time might be contingent on circumstance, Peirce and James conceptualized final truth as something established only by the future, final settlement of all opinion.


title: Western philosophy

text: Pragmatism attempted to find a scientific concept of truth that does not depend on personal insight (revelation) or reference to some metaphysical realm. It interpreted the meaning of a statement by the effect its acceptance would have on practice. Inquiry taken far enough is thus the only path to truth.


title: Western philosophy

text: For Peirce commitment to inquiry was essential to truth-finding, implied by the idea and hope that inquiry is not fruitless. The interpretation of these principles has been subject to discussion ever since. Peirce's maxim of pragmatism is, "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."


title: Western philosophy

text: Critics accused pragmatism falling victim to a simple fallacy: that because something that is true proves useful, that usefulness is an appropriate basis for its truthfulness. Pragmatist thinkers include Dewey, George Santayana, and C. I. Lewis.


title: Western philosophy

text: Pragmatism was later worked on by neopragmatists Richard Rorty who was the first to develop neopragmatist philosophy in his "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979), Hilary Putnam, W. V. O. Quine, and Donald Davidson. Neopragmatism has been described as a bridge between analytic and continental philosophy.


title: Western philosophy

text: The three major contemporary approaches to academic philosophy are analytic philosophy, continental philosophy and pragmatism. They are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.


title: Western philosophy

text: The 20th century deals with the upheavals produced by a series of conflicts within philosophical discourse over the basis of knowledge, with classical certainties overthrown, and new social, economic, scientific and logical problems. 20th-century philosophy was set for a series of attempts to reform and preserve and to alter or abolish, older knowledge systems. Seminal figures include Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The publication of Husserl's "Logical Investigations" (1900–1) and Russell's "The Principles of Mathematics" (1903) is considered to mark the beginning of 20th-century philosophy. The 20th century also saw the increasing professionalization of the discipline and the beginning of the current (contemporary) era of philosophy.


title: Western philosophy

text: Since the Second World War, contemporary philosophy has been divided mostly into analytic and continental traditions; the former carried in the English speaking world and the latter on the continent of Europe. The perceived conflict between continental and analytic schools of philosophy remains prominent, despite increasing skepticism regarding the distinction's usefulness.


title: Western philosophy

text: In the English-speaking world, analytic philosophy became the dominant school for much of the 20th century. The term "analytic philosophy" roughly designates a group of philosophical methods that stress detailed argumentation, attention to semantics, use of classical logic and non-classical logic and clarity of meaning above all other criteria. Though the movement has broadened, it was a cohesive school in the first half of the century. Analytic philosophers were shaped strongly by logical positivism, united by the notion that philosophical problems could and should be solved by attention to logic and language.


title: Western philosophy

text: Gottlob Frege's "The Foundations of Arithmetic" (1884) was the first analytic work, according to Michael Dummett ("Origins of Analytical Philosophy", 1993). Frege was the first to take 'the linguistic turn,' analyzing philosophical problems through language. He invented a formal notational system for logic. His stance was one of anti-psychologism, arguing that logical truths were independent of the human minds discovering them.


title: Western philosophy

text: Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore are also often counted as founders of analytic philosophy. They believed that philosophy should be based on analysing propositions. Russell wrote "Principia Mathematica" (with Alfred North Whitehead) to apply this to mathematics, while Moore did the same for ethics with "Principia Ethica". Russell's attempts to find a foundation for mathematics led him to Russell's paradox, which caused Frege to abandon logicism. Russell espoused logical atomism, declaring that "logic is the essence of philosophy". In his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," Ludwig Wittgenstein put forward a refined version of this view. Wittgenstein, Russell's 'disciple', argued that the problems of philosophy were simply products of language which were actually meaningless. This was based on the picture theory of meaning. Wittgenstein later changed his conception of how language works, arguing instead that it has many different uses, which he called different language games.


title: Western philosophy

text: The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle started as a study group of Russell and Whitehead. They argued that the arguments of metaphysics, ethics and theology were meaningless, as they were not logically or empirically verifiable. This was based on their division of meaningful statements into either the analytic (logical and mathematical statements) and the synthetic (scientific claims). Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap argued that science rested at its roots on direct observation, but Otto Neurath noted that observation already requires theory in order to have meaning. Another participant in the Circle was Carnap's self-confessed disciple, Willard Van Orman Quine. In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', Quine criticized the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Instead, he advocated for a 'web of belief' approach, whereby all beliefs come from contact with reality (including mathematical ones), but with some being further removed from this contact than others.


title: Western philosophy

text: Another former participant in the Circle was Karl Popper. He argued that verificationism was logically incoherent, promoting instead falsificationism as the basis for science. A further advancement in the philosophy of science was made by Imre Lakatos, who argued that negative findings in individual tests did not falsify theories, but rather entire research programmes would eventually fail explain phenomena. Thomas Kuhn further argued that science was composed of paradigms, which would eventually shift when evidence accumulated against them. Based on the idea that different paradigms had different meanings of expressions, Paul Feyerabend went further in arguing for relativism in science.


title: Western philosophy

text: Wittgenstein had first brought up the idea that ordinary language could solve philosophical problems. A loosely associated group of philosophers later became known as practitioners of ordinary language philosophy. It included Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, R. M. Hare, and P. F. Strawson. They believed that as philosophy was not science, it could only be advanced through careful conceptual clarification and connection instead of observation and experimentation. However, they had given up the earlier analytic pursuit of using formal logic to express an ideal language, but did nevertheless share the scepticism of metaphysical grand theories. Unlike Wittgenstein, they believed only some problems of philosophy to be artifacts of language. This approach has been described as the linguistic turn of analytic philosophy. Ryle introduced the concept of category mistake, which described the misapplication of a concept in the wrong context (which he accused Descartes of doing with the ghost in the machine). One of Austin's key insights was that some language perform a perlocutionary function (creating by themselves an effect on the world), thereby being speech acts. This idea was later taken up by John Searle.


title: Western philosophy

text: In the final third of the 20th century, philosophy of language emerged as its own programme. The theory of meaning became central to this programme. Donald Davidson argued that meaning could be understood through a theory of truth. This was based on the work of Alfred Tarski. Empirically, Davidson would find the meaning of words in different languages by linking them with the objective conditions of their utterance, which established their truthness. Meaning therefore emerges from the consensus of interpretations of speaker behaviour. Michael Dummett argued against this view on the basis of its realism. This was because realism would make the truthness of many sentences beyond measurability. Instead, he argued for verifiability, based on the idea that one could recognise the proof of truth when offered it. Alternative to these, Paul Grice put forward a theory that meaning was based on the intention of the speaker, which over time becomes established after repeated use.


title: Western philosophy

text: Theories of reference were another major strand of thought on language. Frege had argued that proper names were linked to its referent through a description of what the name refers to. Russell agreed with this, adding that "this" can replace a description in cases of familiarity. Later, Searle and Strawson expanded these ideas by noting that a cluster of descriptions, each of them usable, may be used by linguistic communities. Keith Donnellan further argued that sometimes a description could be wrong but still make the correct reference, this being different from the attributive use of a description. He, as well as Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam independently, argued that often the referents of proper names are not based on description, but rather on a history of usage passing through users. Towards the end of the century, philosophy of language began to diverge in two directions: the philosophy of mind, and more specific study of particular aspects of language, the latter supported by linguistics.


title: Western philosophy

text: Early identity theories of mind in the 1950s and '60s were based on the work of Ullin Place, Herbert Feigl, and J. J. C. Smart. While earlier philosophers such as the Logical Positivists, Quine, Wittgenstein, and Ryle had all used some form of behaviorism to dispense with the mental, they believed that behaviorism was insufficient in explaining many aspects of mental phenomena. Feigl argued that intentional states could not be thus explained. Instead, he espoused externalism. Place meanwhile argued that the mind could be reduced to physical events, while Feigl and Sense agreed they were identical. Functionalism in contrast argued that the mind was defined by what it does, rather than what it is based on. To argue against this, John Searle developed the Chinese room thought experiment. Davidson argued for anomalous monism, which claims that while mental events cause physical ones, and the all causal relations are governed by natural laws, there are however no natural laws governing the causality between mental and physical events. This anomaly in the name was explained by supervenience.


title: Western philosophy

text: In 1970, Keith Campbell proposed a "new epiphenomenalism", according to which the body produces the mind that does not act on the body, a process which he claims is destined to remain mysterious. Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland argued for eliminative materialism, which claims that understanding the brain will lead to a complete understanding of the mind. This was based on developments in neuroscience. However, physicalist theories of mind have had to grapple with the issue of subjective experience raised by Thomas Nagel in "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and Frank Cameron Jackson's so-called knowledge argument. David Chalmers also argued against physicalism in the philosophical zombie argument. He further noted that subjective experience posed the hard problem of consciousness. The inability of physicalist theories to explain conscious feeling has been termed the explanatory gap. In contrast, Daniel Dennett has claimed that no such gap exists as subjective experiences are a 'philosophical fiction'.


title: Western philosophy

text: Ethics in 20th century analytic philosophy has been argued to have began with Moore's "Principia Ethica". Moore argued that what is good cannot be defined. Instead, he saw ethical behaviour a result of intuition, which led to non-cognitivism. W. D. Ross in contrast argued that duty formed the basis for ethics.


title: Western philosophy

text: Russell's meta-ethical thought anticipated emotivism and error theory. This was supported by the logical positivists, and later popularised by A. J. Ayer. Charles Stevenson also argued that ethical terms were expressions of emotive meanings by speakers. R. M. Hare aimed to expand their meaning from mere expressions, to also being prescriptions which are universalizable. J. L. Mackie supported error theory on the basis that objective values do not exist, as they are culturally relative and would be metaphysically strange.


title: Western philosophy

text: Another strand of ethical thinking began with G. E. M. Anscombe arguing in 1958 that both consequentialism and deontology were based on obligation, which could not function without divine authority, instead promoting virtue ethics. Other notable virtue ethicists included Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre. The latter combined it with communitarianism.


title: Western philosophy

text: Notable students of Quine include Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. The later work of Russell and the philosophy of Willard Van Orman Quine are influential exemplars of the naturalist approach dominant in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. But the diversity of analytic philosophy from the 1970s onward defies easy generalization: the naturalism of Quine and his epigoni was in some precincts superseded by a "new metaphysics" of possible worlds, as in the influential work of David Lewis. Recently, the experimental philosophy movement has sought to reappraise philosophical problems through social science research techniques.


title: Western philosophy

text: Some influential figures in contemporary analytic philosophy are: Timothy Williamson, David Lewis, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, John McDowell, Saul Kripke, Peter van Inwagen, and Patricia Churchland.


title: Western philosophy

text: Analytic philosophy has sometimes been accused of not contributing to the political debate or to traditional questions in aesthetics. However, with the appearance of "A Theory of Justice" by John Rawls and "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" by Robert Nozick, analytic political philosophy acquired respectability. Analytic philosophers have also shown depth in their investigations of aesthetics, with Roger Scruton, Nelson Goodman, Arthur Danto and others developing the subject to its current shape.


title: Western philosophy

text: Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe. 20th-century movements such as German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, modern hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation), critical theory, structuralism, post-structuralism and others are included within this loose category. While identifying any non-trivial common factor in all these schools of thought is bound to be controversial, Michael E. Rosen has hypothesized a few common continental themes: that the natural sciences cannot replace the human sciences; that the thinker is affected by the conditions of experience (one's place and time in history); that philosophy is both theoretical and practical; that metaphilosophy or reflection upon the methods and nature of philosophy itself is an important part of philosophy proper.


title: Western philosophy

text: The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, sought to study consciousness as experienced from a first-person perspective, while Martin Heidegger drew on the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl to propose an unconventional existential approach to ontology.


title: Western philosophy

text: Phenomenologically oriented metaphysics undergirded existentialism—Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus—and finally post-structuralism—Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard (best known for his articulation of postmodernism), Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida (best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction). The psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and others has also been influential in contemporary continental thought. Conversely, some philosophers have attempted to define and rehabilitate older traditions of philosophy. Most notably, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Alasdair MacIntyre have both, albeit in different ways, revived the tradition of Aristotelianism.


title: Western philosophy

text: Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophy, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.


title: Western philosophy

text: Although they did not use the term, the 19th-century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are widely regarded as the fathers of existentialism. Their influence, however, has extended beyond existentialist thought.


title: Western philosophy

text: Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis, originating from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It analyzes class relations and societal conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and a dialectical view of social transformation. Marxist analyses and methodologies influenced political ideologies and social movements. Marxist understandings of history and society were adopted by academics in archeology, anthropology, media studies, political science, theater, history, sociology, art history and theory, cultural studies, education, economics, geography, literary criticism, aesthetics, critical psychology and philosophy.


title: Western philosophy

text: In contemporary philosophy, the term "critical theory" describes the Western Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s. Critical theory maintains that ideology is the principal obstacle to human emancipation.


title: Western philosophy

text: Edmund Husserl's phenomenology was an ambitious attempt to lay the foundations for an account of the structure of conscious experience in general. An important part of Husserl's phenomenological project was to show that all conscious acts are directed at or about objective content, a feature that Husserl called "intentionality". Husserl published only a few works in his lifetime, which treat phenomenology mainly in abstract methodological terms; but he left an enormous quantity of unpublished concrete analyses. Husserl's work was immediately influential in Germany, with the foundation of phenomenological schools in Munich (Munich phenomenology) and Göttingen (Göttingen phenomenology). Phenomenology later achieved international fame through the work of such philosophers as Martin Heidegger (formerly Husserl's research assistant and a proponent of hermeneutic phenomenology, a theoretical synthesis of modern hermeneutics and phenomenology), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Through the work of Heidegger and Sartre, Husserl's focus on subjective experience influenced aspects of existentialism.


title: Western philosophy

text: Inaugurated by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism sought to clarify systems of signs through analyzing the discourses they both limit and make possible. Saussure conceived of the sign as being delimited by all the other signs in the system, and ideas as being incapable of existence prior to linguistic structure, which articulates thought. This led continental thought away from humanism, and toward what was termed the decentering of man: language is no longer spoken by man to express a true inner self, but language speaks man.


title: Western philosophy

text: Structuralism sought the province of a hard science, but its positivism soon came under fire by post-structuralism, a wide field of thinkers, some of whom were once themselves structuralists, but later came to criticize it. Structuralists believed they could analyze systems from an external, objective standing, for example, but the poststructuralists argued that this is incorrect, that one cannot transcend structures and thus analysis is itself determined by what it examines. While the distinction between the signifier and signified was treated as crystalline by structuralists, poststructuralists asserted that every attempt to grasp the signified results in more signifiers, so meaning is always in a state of being deferred, making an ultimate interpretation impossible.


title: Western philosophy

text: Structuralism came to dominate continental philosophy throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, encompassing thinkers as diverse as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan. Post-structuralism came to predominate from the 1970s onwards, including thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and even Roland Barthes; it incorporated a critique of structuralism's limitations.


title: Western philosophy

text: Process philosophy is a tradition beginning with Alfred North Whitehead, who began teaching and writing on process and metaphysics when he joined Harvard University in 1924. This tradition identifies metaphysical reality with change.


title: Western philosophy

text: Process philosophy is sometimes classified as closer to continental philosophy than analytic philosophy, because it is usually only taught in continental departments. However, other sources state that process philosophy should be placed somewhere in the middle between the poles of analytic versus continental methods in contemporary philosophy.


title: Western philosophy

text: The Ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho accompanied Alexander the Great in his eastern campaigns, spending about 18 months in India. Pyrrho subsequently returned to Greece and founded Pyrrhonism, a philosophy with substantial similarities with Buddhism. The Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtius explained that Pyrrho's equanimity and detachment from the world were acquired in India. Pyrrho was directly influenced by Buddhism in developing his philosophy, which is based on Pyrrho's interpretation of the Buddhist three marks of existence. According to Edward Conze, Pyrrhonism can be compared to Buddhist philosophy, especially the Indian Madhyamika school. The Pyrrhonists' goal of ataraxia (the state of being untroubled) is a soteriological goal similar to nirvana. The Pyrrhonists promoted suspending judgment (epoché) about dogma (beliefs about non-evident matters) as the way to reach ataraxia. This is similar to the Buddha's refusal to answer certain metaphysical questions which he saw as non-conductive to the path of Buddhist practice and Nagarjuna's "relinquishing of all views (drsti)". Adrian Kuzminski argues for direct influence between these two systems of thought. In "Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism" According to Kuzminski, both philosophies argue against assenting to any dogmatic assertions about an ultimate metaphysical reality behind our sense impressions as a tactic to reach tranquility and both also make use of logical arguments against other philosophies in order to expose their contradictions.


title: Western philosophy

text: The Cyrenaic philosopher Hegesias of Cyrene is thought by some to have been influenced by the teachings of Ashoka's Buddhist missionaries.


title: Western philosophy

text: Empiricist philosophers, such as Hume and Berkeley, favoured the bundle theory of personal identity. In this theory, the mind is simply 'a bundle of perceptions' without unity. One interpretation of Hume's view of the self, argued for by philosopher and psychologist James Giles, is that Hume is not arguing for a bundle theory, which is a form of reductionism, but rather for an eliminative view of the self. Rather than reducing the self to a bundle of perceptions, Hume rejects the idea of the self altogether. On this interpretation, Hume is proposing a "no-self theory" and thus has much in common with Buddhist thought (see "anattā"). Psychologist Alison Gopnik has argued that Hume was in a position to learn about Buddhist thought during his time in France in the 1730s.


title: Dependency theory

text: Dependency theory is the notion that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. A central contention of dependency theory is that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the "world system". This theory was officially developed in the late 1960s following World War II, as scholars searched for the root issue in the lack of development in Latin America.


title: Dependency theory

text: The theory arose as a reaction to modernization theory, an earlier theory of development which held that all societies progress through similar stages of development, that today's underdeveloped areas are thus in a similar situation to that of today's developed areas at some time in the past, and that, therefore, the task of helping the underdeveloped areas out of poverty is to accelerate them along this supposed common path of development, by various means such as investment, technology transfers, and closer integration into the world market. Dependency theory rejected this view, arguing that underdeveloped countries are not merely primitive versions of developed countries, but have unique features and structures of their own; and, importantly, are in the situation of being the weaker members in a world market economy.


title: Dependency theory

text: Some writers have argued for its continuing relevance as a conceptual orientation to the global division of wealth. Dependency theorists can typically be divided into two categories: liberal reformists and neo-Marxists. Liberal reformists typically advocate for targeted policy interventions, while the neo-Marxists believe in a command-centered economy.


title: Dependency theory

text: Dependency theory originates with two papers published in 1949, one by Hans Singer and one by Raúl Prebisch, in which the authors observe that the terms of trade for underdeveloped countries relative to the developed countries had deteriorated over time: the underdeveloped countries were able to purchase fewer and fewer manufactured goods from the developed countries in exchange for a given quantity of their raw materials exports. This idea is known as the Prebisch–Singer thesis. Prebisch, an Argentine economist at the United Nations Commission for Latin America (UNCLA), went on to conclude that the underdeveloped nations must employ some degree of protectionism in trade if they were to enter a self-sustaining development path. He argued that import-substitution industrialisation (ISI), not a trade-and-export orientation, was the best strategy for underdeveloped countries. The theory was developed from a Marxian perspective by Paul A. Baran in 1957 with the publication of his "The Political Economy of Growth". Dependency theory shares many points with earlier, Marxist, theories of imperialism by Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, and has attracted continued interest from Marxists. Some authors identify two main streams in dependency theory: the Latin American Structuralist, typified by the work of Prebisch, Celso Furtado, and Aníbal Pinto at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC, or, in Spanish, CEPAL); and the American Marxist, developed by Paul A. Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Andre Gunder Frank.


title: Dependency theory

text: Using the Latin American dependency model, the Guyanese Marxist historian Walter Rodney, in his book "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa", described in 1972 an Africa that had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent.


title: Dependency theory

text: The theory was popular in the 1960s and 1970s as a criticism of modernization theory, which was falling increasingly out of favor because of continued widespread poverty in much of the world. At that time the assumptions of liberal theories of development were under attack. It was used to explain the causes of overurbanization, a theory that urbanization rates outpaced industrial growth in several developing countries.


title: Dependency theory

text: The Latin American Structuralist and the American Marxist schools had significant differences but, according to economist Matias Vernengo, they agreed on some basic points:[B]oth groups would agree that at the core of the dependency relation between center and periphery lays [lies] the inability of the periphery to develop an autonomous and dynamic process of technological innovation. Technology – the Promethean force unleashed by the Industrial Revolution – is at the center of stage. The Center countries controlled the technology and the systems for generating technology. Foreign capital could not solve the problem, since it only led to limited transmission of technology, but not the process of innovation itself. Baran and others frequently spoke of the international division of labour – skilled workers in the center; unskilled in the periphery – when discussing key features of dependency.


title: Dependency theory

text: Baran placed surplus extraction and capital accumulation at the center of his analysis. Development depends on a population's producing more than it needs for bare subsistence (a surplus). Further, some of that surplus must be used for capital accumulation – the purchase of new means of production – if development is to occur; spending the surplus on things like luxury consumption does not produce development. Baran noted two predominant kinds of economic activity in poor countries. In the older of the two, plantation agriculture, which originated in colonial times, most of the surplus goes to the landowners, who use it to emulate the consumption patterns of wealthy people in the developed world; much of it thus goes to purchase foreign-produced luxury items –automobiles, clothes, etc. – and little is accumulated for investing in development. The more recent kind of economic activity in the periphery is industry—but of a particular kind. It is usually carried out by foreigners, although often in conjunction with local interests. It is often under special tariff protection or other government concessions. The surplus from this production mostly goes to two places: part of it is sent back to the foreign shareholders as profit; the other part is spent on conspicuous consumption in a similar fashion to that of the plantation aristocracy. Again, little is used for development. Baran thought that political revolution was necessary to break this pattern.


title: Dependency theory

text: In the 1960s, members of the Latin American Structuralist school argued that there is more latitude in the system than the Marxists believed. They argued that it allows for partial development or "dependent development"–development, but still under the control of outside decision makers. They cited the partly successful attempts at industrialisation in Latin America around that time (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico) as evidence for this hypothesis. They were led to the position that dependency is not a relation between commodity exporters and industrialised countries, but between countries with different degrees of industrialisation. In their approach, there is a distinction made between the economic and political spheres: economically, one may be developed or underdeveloped; but even if (somewhat) economically developed, one may be politically autonomous or dependent. More recently, Guillermo O'Donnell has argued that constraints placed on development by neoliberalism were lifted by the military coups in Latin America that came to promote development in authoritarian guise (O'Donnell, 1982).


title: Dependency theory

text: The importance of multinational corporations and state promotion of technology were emphasised by the Latin American Structuralists.


title: Dependency theory

text: Fajnzybler has made a distinction between systemic or authentic competitiveness, which is the ability to compete based on higher productivity, and spurious competitiveness, which is based on low wages.


title: Dependency theory

text: The third-world debt crisis of the 1980s and continued stagnation in Africa and Latin America in the 1990s caused some doubt as to the feasibility or desirability of "dependent development".


title: Dependency theory

text: The "sine qua non" of the dependency relationship is not the difference in technological sophistication, as traditional dependency theorists believe, but rather the difference in financial strength between core and peripheral countries–particularly the inability of peripheral countries to borrow in their own currency. He believes that the hegemonic position of the United States is very strong because of the importance of its financial markets and because it controls the international reserve currency – the US dollar. He believes that the end of the Bretton Woods international financial agreements in the early 1970s considerably strengthened the United States' position because it removed some constraints on their financial actions.


title: Dependency theory

text: "Standard" dependency theory differs from Marxism, in arguing against internationalism and any hope of progress in less developed nations towards industrialization and a liberating revolution. Theotonio dos Santos described a "new dependency", which focused on both the internal and external relations of less-developed countries of the periphery, derived from a Marxian analysis. Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (in office 1995–2002) wrote extensively on dependency theory while in political exile during the 1960s, arguing that it was an approach to studying the economic disparities between the centre and periphery. Cardoso summarized his version of dependency theory as follows:


title: Dependency theory

text: The analysis of development patterns in the 1990s and beyond is complicated by the fact that capitalism develops not smoothly, but with very strong and self-repeating ups and downs, called cycles. Relevant results are given in studies by Joshua Goldstein, Volker Bornschier, and Luigi Scandella.


title: Dependency theory

text: With the economic growth of India and some East Asian economies, dependency theory has lost some of its former influence. It still influences some NGO campaigns, such as Make Poverty History and the fair trade movement.


title: Dependency theory

text: Two other early writers relevant to dependency theory were François Perroux and Kurt Rothschild. Other leading dependency theorists include Herb Addo, Walden Bello, Ruy Mauro Marini, Enzo Faletto, Armando Cordova, Ernest Feder, Pablo González Casanova, Keith Griffin, Kunibert Raffer, Paul Israel Singer, and Osvaldo Sunkel. Many of these authors focused their attention on Latin America; dependency theory in the Islamic world was primarily refined by the Egyptian economist Samir Amin.


title: Dependency theory

text: Tausch, based on works of Amin from 1973 to 1997, lists the following main characteristics of periphery capitalism:


title: Dependency theory

text: The American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein refined the Marxist aspect of the theory and expanded on it, to form world-systems theory. World Systems Theory is also known as WST and aligns closely with the idea of the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer". Wallerstein states that the poor and peripheral nations continue to get more poor as the developed core nations use their resources to become richer. Wallerstein developed the World Systems Theory utilizing the Dependence theory along with the ideas of Marx and the Annales School. This theory postulates a third category of countries, the "semi-periphery", intermediate between the core and periphery. Wallerstein believed in a tri-modal rather than a bi-modal system because he viewed the world-systems as more complicated than a simplistic classification as either core or periphery nations. To Wallerstein, many nations do not fit into one of these two categories, so he proposed the idea of a semi-periphery as an in between state within his model. In this model, the semi-periphery is industrialized, but with less sophistication of technology than in the core; and it does not control finances. The rise of one group of semi-peripheries tends to be at the cost of another group, but the unequal structure of the world economy based on unequal exchange tends to remain stable. Tausch traces the beginnings of world-systems theory to the writings of the Austro-Hungarian socialist Karl Polanyi after the First World War, but its present form is usually associated with the work of Wallerstein.


title: Dependency theory

text: Dependency theorists hold that short-term spurts of growth notwithstanding, long-term growth in the periphery will be imbalanced and unequal, and will tend towards high negative current account balances. Cyclical fluctuations also have a profound effect on cross-national comparisons of economic growth and societal development in the medium and long run. What seemed like spectacular long-run growth may in the end turn out to be just a short run cyclical spurt after a long recession. Cycle time plays an important role. Giovanni Arrighi believed that the logic of accumulation on a world scale shifts over time, and that the 1980s and beyond once more showed a deregulated phase of world capitalism with a logic, characterized - in contrast to earlier regulatory cycles - by the dominance of financial capital.


title: Dependency theory

text: Economic policies based on dependency theory have been criticized by free-market economists such as Peter Bauer and Martin Wolf and others:


title: Dependency theory

text: Market economists cite a number of examples in their arguments against dependency theory. The improvement of India's economy after it moved from state-controlled business to open trade is one of the most often cited (see also economy of India, "The Commanding Heights"). India's example seems to contradict dependency theorists' claims concerning comparative advantage and mobility, as much as its economic growth originated from movements such as outsourcing – one of the most mobile forms of capital transfer. In Africa, states that have emphasized import-substitution development, such as Zimbabwe, have typically been among the worst performers, while the continent's most successful non-oil based economies, such as Egypt, South Africa, and Tunisia, have pursued trade-based development.


title: Dependency theory

text: According to economic historian Robert C. Allen, dependency theory's claims are "debatable" due to fact that the protectionism that was implemented in Latin America as a solution ended up failing. The countries incurred too much debt and Latin America went into a recession. One of the problems was that the Latin American countries simply had too small national markets to be able to efficiently produce complex industrialized goods, such as automobiles.


title: Dependency theory

text: Many nations have been affected by both the positive and negative effects of the Dependency Theory. The idea of national dependency on another nation is not a relatively new concept even though the dependency theory itself is rather new. Dependency is perpetuated by using capitalism and finance. The dependent nations come to owe the developed nations so much money and capital that it is not possible to escape the debt, continuing the dependency for the foreseeable future.


title: Dependency theory

text: An example of the dependency theory is that during the years of 1650 to 1900 European nations such as Britain and France took over or colonialized other nations. They used their superior military technology and naval strength at the time to do this. This began an economic system in the Americas, Africa, and Asia to then export the natural materials from their land to Europe. After shipping the materials to Europe, Britain and the other European countries made products with these materials and then sent them back to colonized parts of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. This resulted in the transfer of wealth from these regions’ products to Europe for taking control of the products. Armenia's economy depends on its ore exports as the country lacks the technology to produce high-value consumer goods from these ores. Therefore, other countries produce goods with these ores with which Armenia then buys from them. Armenia-Russia trade is an example of the Dependency Theory. The largest export from Armenia is heavy metals which increased during the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Armenia also expanded its exports to Russia in the food sector. Exports of vehicles for land, air, and sea have also increased.


title: Dependency theory

text: Dependency theory is considered rather controversial and many say it is not still in effect. Some scholars and politicians claim that with the decline of colonialism, dependency has been erased. Other scholars counter this approach, and state that our society still has national powerhouses such as the United States, European Nations such as Germany and Britain, China, and rising India that hundreds of other nations rely on for military aid, economic investments, etc.


title: Dependency theory

text: Aid dependency is an economic problem described as the reliance of less developed countries (LDCs) on more developed countries (MDCs) for financial aid and other resources. More specifically, aid dependency refers to the proportion of government spending that is given by foreign donors. Having an aid dependency ratio of about 15%-20% or higher will have negative effects on the country. What causes dependency is the inhibition of development and economic/political reform that results from trying to use aid as a long-term solution to poverty-ridden countries. Aid dependency arose from long term provisions of aid to countries in need in which the receiving country became accustomed to and developed a dependency syndrome. Aid dependency is most common today in Africa. The top donors as of 2013 were the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany while the top receivers were Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Ethiopia.


title: Dependency theory

text: International development aid became widely popularized post World-War Two due to first-world countries trying to create a more open economy as well as cold war competition. In 1970, the United Nations agreed on 0.7% of Gross National Income per country as the target for how much should be dedicated for international aid. In his book “Ending Aid Dependence”, Yash Tondon describes how organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) have driven many African countries into dependency. During the economic crisis in the 1980s and the 1990s, a great deal of Sub-Saharan countries in Africa saw an influx of aid money which in turn resulted in dependency over the next few decades. These countries became so dependent that the President of Tanzania, Benjamin W. Mkapa, stated that “Development aid has taken deep root to the psyche of the people, especially in the poorer countries of the South. It is similar to drug addiction.”


title: Dependency theory

text: While the widespread belief is that aid is motivated only by assisting poor countries, and this is true in some cases, there is substantial evidence that suggests strategic, political, and welfare interests of the donors are driving forces behind aid. Maizels and Nissanke (MN 1984), and McKinlay and Little (ML, 1977) have conducted studies to analyze donors’ motives. From these studies they found that US aid flows are influenced by military as well as strategic factors. British and French aid is given to countries that were former colonies, and also to countries in which they have significant investment interest and strong trade relations.


title: Dependency theory

text: A main concern revolving around the issue of foreign aid is that the citizens in the country that is benefiting from aid lose motivation to work after receiving aid. In addition, some citizens will deliberately work less, resulting in a lower income, which in turn qualifies them for aid provision. Aid dependent countries are associated with having a lowly motivated workforce, a result from being accustomed to constant aid, and therefore the country is less likely to make economic progress and the living-standards are less likely to be improved. A country with long-term aid dependency remains unable to be self-sufficient and is less likely to make meaningful GDP growth which would allow for them to rely less on aid from richer countries. Food aid has been criticized heavily along with other aid imports due to its damage to the domestic economy. A higher dependency on aid imports results in a decline in the domestic demand for those products. In the long-run, the agricultural industry in LDC countries grows weaker due to long-term declines in demand as a result from food aid. In the future when aid is decreased, many LDC countries's agricultural markets are under-developed and therefore it is cheaper to import agricultural products. This occurred in Haiti, where 80% of their grain stocks come from the United States even after a large decrease in aid. In countries where there is a primary-product dependency on an item being imported as aid, such as wheat, economic shocks can occur and push the country further into an economic crisis.