Progressivism and Naturalism - Essay Example

he main contribution was that through practical political action and innovative political theory, they reformulated the concept of a liberal state in a way that rejected both traditional liberal minimalism and revolutionary socialism (McGerr 2005). III. I suppose that the progressivism was a great leap towards democracy and social equality. As administrators and legislators, they addressed such problems as insufficient medical care, unsafe working conditions, and exploitation of women and children.

Yet for all their concern with the most vulnerable among the working classes, they rejected a politics of class conflict. Many, surely a majority of those who identified themselves as Republicans, were uncomfortable with labor unions; so were most non-urban Democrats. I apply the concept of Progressivism to modern life analyzing economic and political events. Progressive leaders did so without rejecting the forces of change. Many of the progressives eagerly embraced modernity, employing its intellectual tools with zest in their bid to refashion America.

NaturalismI. Naturalism is movement of thought that not only takes its name from "nature" but assigns an unqualifiedly positive valence to the fact of our being part of nature. In the tradition of the Enlightenment from which it is itself descended, naturalism was originally a reaction against religious ideas of a supernatural domain to which human beings were supposed to be somehow akin. It was also directed against philosophical systems like idealism that were thought to have much (Clark 2007). II. Contributors: W.V. Quine, Karl Popper (philosophy), Jack London, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser (in literature).

Naturalism as a movement of opposition to the systems of belief also came to be associated, in. The movement's critical mass was in the "urban middle classes interpreting "urban" as did the census bureau to include small towns and cities, not just metropolitan America. The "middle classes" included small business enterprisers of all types, squeezed by enormous corporations, resentful of what they considered railroad rate gouging, insecure about their future livelihoods Naturalism shows how different the world we live in and we ourselves are from the standard accounts that both science and philosophy have given of such matters.

Naturalism does not explain the structure of the natural world in which everything took place. These issues do remain and that chief among them is precisely this question about the unique authority of the natural sciences to determine what there is in the world. I suppose that naturalism assumes that whatever is described as being "given" or "present" must be "in the mind" in some objectionable dualistic sense of that expression. Naturalism, accordingly, rejects root and branch anything that is so described and it does so without any sense that it may thereby have cut the ground out from under its own familiarity with the world about which, after all, it has a great deal to say.

I use this concept to understand everyday life and our role in the world. y argument will be that the way human beings are in the world with other entities cannot be understood on the model of physical systems.