Eliseo Vivas Quotes

Eliseo Vivas was a 20th-century philosopher and literary theorist.

As a child, his family fled Colombia in response to the presidency of Cipriano Castro. They went to Curacao, then Paris, then, in 1915, to New York City. Vivas served as the Venezuelan consul in Philadelphia, then turned to academia studying or teaching at, among other schools, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Chicago, Ohio State University, Northwestern University, Rockford College, and the University of Iowa.Vivas's philosophy was essentially conservative, and he relied on poetry as metaphysics while abandoning naturalism. He arrived at his conclusions after trying on many schools, "from Marxism to conservatism, and from naturalism to value realism."His papers are collected by Northwestern University. Wikipedia

✵ 13. July 1901 – 1993

Eliseo Vivas: 2 quotes0 likes

Eliseo Vivas Quotes

“As philosophy becomes academic and tends to repudiate its responsibility to the culture in which it flourishes, the layman in need of wisdom and vision turns to evangelic practicalists, who confirm him in his myopic prejudice that the exclusive end of moral philosophy is actually to direct social activity toward the concrete and immediate improvement of social conditions. But, since there is no way of knowing except by arduous philosophical criticism whether the ends to which a reformer would lead us represent genuine improvement, the practicalist’s impatience with theory is at best hasty.”

The Moral Life and the Ethical Life (Chicago: 1950), pp. 3-4

“With the hidden hatred of sustained intellectual effort, [the evangelist of practicalism] encourages whose who happen to listen to him in the name of reasonableness to dispense with reason.”

The Moral Life and the Ethical Life (Chicago: 1950), p. 4

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