to conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom ( identify the infinitive )
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Answer:
Introduction
The following chapters,selected from five different titles in the Routledge Classics
series,provide a brief taste of what some great writers of the Twentieth century have
said about both hope and fear,the theme of the 2016 Being Human festival.
Bertrand Russell's classic essay WhyI amNot a Christian (1927) caused great
controversy on its publication and was a factor in Russell's later dismissal from his
position at the College of the City of New York in 1940.Why should anyone want to be
a Christian? Russell argues that the real reason people accept religion has little to do
with argumentation and much more to do with emotion,especially fear.For Russell,
fear is the very basis of religion: 'Fear of the mysterious,fear of defeat,fear of death'.
The way out of such self-imposed fear,according to Russell,was to cultivate an
open-minded outlook,a free intelligence and hope for the future.
Where Russell sees religion as a source of fear,Mary Douglas's Purityand Danger (1966;
Routledge Classics 2002) is one of the great anthropological studies of religion and
ritual. In her Introduction to this work,reprinted here,Douglas challenges the idea of
primitive religion as governed by a simple opposition between purity and defilement.
Not only does this present a false picture of religious belief but of attitudes towards
dirt-avoidance generally. Far from being unreasonable,activities such as removing dirt,
papering,and decorating create symbolic patterns and public displays,imparting a
unity to the complexity of human experience.Dirt concerns the relation of order to
disorder,form to formlessness and life to death.As such,the rules of purity are an ideal
means of studying religion,which is what Douglas sets out to do.
Karl Popper's The Open Societyand ItsEnemies(1945) is one of the great critiques of the
intellectual architecture behind totalitarian systems."If our civilisation is to survive,?
Popper writes in the Introduction,reprinted here,?we must break with the habit of
deference to great men.?For Popper these men are Plato,Hegel and Marx. Popper
argues that whilst they had vast influence,their arguments are fundamentally flawed ?
and dangerous.They are utopian in assuming they have grasped the 'laws' of history
and,crucially for Popper as a philosopher of science,they are dangerous because they
ignore the distinction between prediction and prophesy.Popper spells out how every
utopian idea contains the seeds of totalitarianism in this great work,hailed by Bertrand
Russell as 'a profound defence of democracy' and hailed by the Guardian as one of the
100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time.
Published a few years prior to The Open Societyand ItsEnemiesErich Fromm's The Fear
of Freedom(1942) is one of the founding works of political psychology.A psychoanalyst
and member of the famous Frankfurt School Fromm asks why,despite a long history of
hard-won social and political liberties,human beings have so readily given up their
freedom and submitted to authority. For Fromm,it is because human beings are caught
in an inescapable paradox: We are drawn towards community and belonging as a desire
Answer:
The conquest of fear is the beginning of wisdom.