Search results for "Mediocrity principle"
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The Bourdieu Affair
2018
In this chapter, the author analyzes Pierre Bourdieu as a representative of the French intellectual tradition. In the name of morality, he rose to defend those who suffered injustice. In the Bourdieu affair, the sufferers of injustice were the unemployed and part-time workers. The opponents were the neoliberal market ideologists, historical successors to the form of capitalism Emile Zola had already dissected in his book on the stock exchange, Avarice (greed), as well as audio-visual communication tools, which Bourdieu accused of mediocrity. As in the cases of Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre, Bourdieu’s message is universal, even though the problems selected, the form of their presentation and th…
A Place for Life
2010
The belief in the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations starts from the so-called principle of mediocrity. This principle postulates that Earth is a normal planet that rotates around a normal star, which in turn is located in a normal galaxy. That is to say, there is nothing so special in our world as to make it unique. This is a logical conclusion, toward which we are guided by the successive “Copernican turns” that science has suffered throughout its long history, and which has removed us from the central position we once believed to occupy in the universe.