Hippolyte Taine Quotes on Knowledge
Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) was the most systematic French positivist of the Second Empire and Third Republic, applying the determinist program of "race, milieu, and moment" to literature, history, and the philosophy of mind. De l'Intelligence (1870) presents knowledge as a hierarchy of sensations and images whose laws of association can be studied with the rigor of natural science, and whose surface unity as a self conceals the underlying "polypary" of competing mental events. The framework anticipates both psychophysical naturalism and the structuralist analysis of culture that Lévi-Strauss would later develop.
Quotes
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Attributed to Hippolyte Taine:
“Race, milieu, and moment determine the form of every cultural product.”
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Attributed to Hippolyte Taine:
“The historian must approach human facts with the methods of natural science.”
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Attributed to Hippolyte Taine:
“Literature is the documentary expression of an age.”
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Attributed to Hippolyte Taine:
“What we call genius is the convergence of many ordinary forces.”
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“J'ai beaucoup étudié les philosophes et les chats. La sagesse des chats est infiniment supérieure .”
Translation: I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior. | Epigraph for his book, Vie et opinions philosophiques d'un chat (1858). Paris: Rivages poche/Petit bibliothèque, 2014, back cover. -
“Translation: I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.”
J'ai beaucoup étudié les philosophes et les chats. La sagesse des chats est infiniment supérieure . -
“Epigraph for his book, Vie et opinions philosophiques d'un chat (1858). Paris: Rivages poche/Petit bibliothèque, 2014, back cover.”
J'ai beaucoup étudié les philosophes et les chats. La sagesse des chats est infiniment supérieure . -
“The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.”
Philosophy of Art (1865) -
“Philosophy of Art (1865)”
The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies. -
“One puts in the hands of each adult a ballot, but on the back of each soldier a knapsack: with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the Twentieth Century, with what exasperation of ill will and distrust, with what loss of wholesome effort, by what a perversion of productive discoveries, accompanied by what an improvement in the means of destruction, by what recoil toward the inferior and u”
Origines de la France contemporaine , cited in Hoffman Nickerson, The Armed Horde (1940)