Aryan superiority theory meaning

In the Vedic doctrine, the astral life span of a pitra, or ancestor, is 3,000 years. A nameless woman who died in Rakhigarhi, a settlement in Haryana of antiquity, and an ancestor of the Harappan civilisation, would never have guessed that she would be the centre of a debate 4,500 years later. DNA tests showed that the deceased, whose long-forgotten name has been replaced by the number ‘14411’, did not possess the R1a1 gene—the ‘Aryan gene’ of the Bronze Age people who lived 4,000 years ago in the Central Asian ‘Pontic steppe’ situated between the Black Sea and the Caspian. The discovery cast doubts on the colonial Aryan Migration Theory (AMT), popularly called AIT (Aryan Invasion Theory). When the earth gives up its secrets, ghosts of dead cultures rise to question the beliefs of centuries. Simply put, AIT states that India was invaded by Aryans, a fair blue-eyed nomadic tribe from Europe in 1,500 BC who drove out the dark, snub-nosed Dravidians to South India. Subsequently, these speaking Aryans composed the Vedas. Long suppressed by Left-leaning academia and Marxist historians who had been drafting the syllabus of the past for seven decades, Hindutva scholars are on a Swachh Bharat History Mission using classical, anthropological and archaeological evidence to refute the invasion doctrine; sometimes even wandering into the misty miasma of mythology to prove a point. It’s a touchy subject: a former customs official established Sri Ram’s birthday as January 10, 5114 BC, a...

• The Aryan myth says that India's Vedic Manuscripts, and the Hindu civilization that wrote them, were constructed by Indo-European-speaking, horse-riding nomads who invaded and conquered the Indus Valley civilizations. • Although some nomads may have made it onto the Indian subcontinent, there is no evidence of a "conquering," and plenty of evidence that the Vedic manuscripts were home-grown developments in India. • Adolf Hitler co-opted and subverted the idea, arguing that the people who invaded India were Nordic and supposedly the ancestors of the Nazis. • If an invasion took place at all, it was by Asian—not Nordic—people. Sometime around 1700 BCE, the Aryans invaded the ancient urban civilizations of the During the 19th century, many European missionaries and imperialists traveled the world seeking conquests and converts. One country which saw a great deal of this kind of exploration was India (including what is now Pakistan). Some of the missionaries were also antiquarians by avocation, and one such fellow was the French missionary Abbé Dubois (1770–1848). His Dubois' work was translated into English by the British East India Company in 1897 and featured a laudatory preface by German archaeologist Friedrich Max Müller. It was this text that formed the basis of the Aryan invasion story—not the Vedic manuscripts themselves. Scholars had long noted the similarities between Sanskrit—the ancient language in which the classical Vedic texts are written—and other Latin-based...

Humor The philosophical study of humor has been focused on the development of a satisfactory definition of humor, which until recently has been treated as roughly co-extensive with laughter. The main task is to develop an adequate theory of just what humor is. According to the standard analysis, humor theories can be classified into three neatly identifiable groups: incongruity, superiority, and relief theories. Incongruity theory is the leading approach and includes historical figures such as Rhetoric. Primarily focusing on the object of humor, this school sees humor as a response to an incongruity, a term broadly used to include ambiguity, logical impossibility, irrelevance, and inappropriateness. The paradigmatic Superiority theorist is play theory. Play theorists are not so much listing necessary conditions for something’s counting as humor, as they are asking us to look at humor as an extension of animal play. While the task of defining humor is a seemingly simple one, it has proven quite difficult. Each theory attempts to provide a characterization of what is at least at the core of humor. However, these theories are not necessarily competing; they may be seen as simply focusing on different aspects of humor, treating certain aspects as more fundamental than others. Table of Contents • • • • • • • • • • Almost every major figure in the history of philosophy has proposed a theory, but after 2500 years of discussion there has been little consensus about what constitute...

Racism fueled Nazi ideology and policies. The Nazis viewed the world as being divided up into competing inferior and superior races, each struggling for survival and dominance. They believed the Jews were not a religious denomination, but a dangerous non-European “race.” Nazi racism would produce murder on an unprecedented scale. • 1 Racists believe that innate, inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. In the early twentieth-century, such views on race were widely accepted in many parts of the world. In fact, race is not biologically based, it is a cultural classification of groups. • 2 According to Nazi theories of race, Germans and other Europeans had perceived superior physical and mental traits. They considered European peoples to be “Aryans,” descended from the ancient Indo-Europeans who settled throughout the European continent as well as in Iran and India. • 3 Racial antisemitism is the prejudice against or hatred of Jews based on false scientific theories. This aspect of racism was always an integral part of Nazism. Racists are people who believe that innate, inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. The doctrine of racism asserts that blood determines national-ethnic identity. Within a racist framework, the value of a human being is not determined by his or her individuality, but instead by membership in a so-called "racial collective nation." Many intellectuals, including scientists, have lent pseudoscientific suppor...

Loading... The following article on Nazi eugenics is an excerpt from Richard Weikart’s book The origins of eugenics beliefs Hitler’s views on eugenics were based on social policies that placed the biological improvement of the Aryan Race, or the Germanic “master race” through eugenics at the center of Nazi belief. But Hitler did not create these views. He merely put into policy ideas that circulated throughout the western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Loading... The roots of Nazi ideology were found in Darwin, Nietzsche, and philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They made their way to Hitler by way of Julius Friedrich Lehmann, a Munich publisher specializing in medical texts, as well as works disseminating scientific racism and eugenics. Lehmann befriended Hitler in the early 1920s and sent him inscribed copies of many of the racist books churned out by his publishing house, including books that popularized racist anthropology. Lehmann also published the journal Deutschlands Erneuerung ( Germany’s Renewal), which was filled with articles promoting racism and eugenics. In a March 1922 circular, Hitler recommended that Nazi Party members read this journal, and in 1924 he published an article in it himself (in part because the Nazi press had been banned in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch). Hitler’s views of eugenics in his own words In his two books, Hitler discussed evolutionary theory as vital to his theory of racial struggle and eugenics. ...

In this article, I consider the standard interpretation of the superiority theory of humor attributed to Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, according to which the theory allegedly places feelings of superiority at the center of humor and comic amusement. The view that feelings of superiority are at the heart of all comic amusement is wildly implausible. Therefore textual evidence for the interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, or Hobbes as offering the superiority theory as an essentialist theory of humor is worth careful consideration. Through textual analysis I argue that not one of these three philosophers defends an essentialist theory of comic amusement. I also discuss the way various theories of humor relate to one another and the proper place of a superiority theory in humor theory in light of my analysis. I. INTRODUCTION There are, it is said, three traditional theories of humor: the superiority theory, the incongruity theory, and the relief theory. However, as some have pointed out, the theories are not true rivals because they are not theories of the same thing (Zamir Some presentations of the superiority theory are more measured than others. David Monro says, “According to any superiority theory of humor, the laugher always looks down on whatever he laughs at, and so judges it inferior by some standard” (1988, 349). Others give the theory a more limited and more reasonable scope. For example, Eva Dadlez states: “Superiority theories ally humor principally with ridicule a...

The Aryan Invasion theory was first propounded when linguistic similarities between Sanskrit and the major European languages were discovered by European scholars during the colonial era. In an atmosphere of raging eurocentricism, it was inevitable that any explanation of this seemingly inexplicable discovery would taken on racial and ideological overtones. (See Refs. 1) Colonial expositions of the Aryan Invasion Theory British intellectuals were particularly nonplussed by this apparent link between the languages of the conquerors and the conquered. In the earliest phases of British rule in India, the East India Company proceeded largely unconsciously - without moral dilemmas and without overt recourse to ideological or racial superiority. But as the rule of the East India Company expanded, and battles became more hard fought and the resistance to British occupation in India grew, the ideology of European racial superiority became almost essential in justifying British presence in India - not only to assuage British conscience, but also to convince the Indian people that the British were not mere colonial conquerors but a superior race on a noble civilizational mission. After 1857, the British education system in India had been deliberately designed to assist in the development of a narrow but influential class of deeply indoctrinated and predominantly loyal agents of British colonial rule in India. British elaborations of the Aryan invasion theory became powerful and conv...

Although most people value humor, philosophers have said little about it, and what they have said is largely critical. Three traditional theories of laughter and humor are examined, along with the theory that humor evolved from mock-aggressive play in apes. Understanding humor as play helps counter the traditional objections to it and reveals some of its benefits, including those it shares with philosophy itself. When people are asked what’s important in their lives, they often mention humor. Couples listing the traits they prize in their spouses usually put “sense of humor” at or near the top. Philosophers are concerned with what is important in life, so two things are surprising about what they have said about humor. The first is how little they have said. From ancient times to the 20 th century, the most that any notable philosopher wrote about laughter or humor was an essay, and only a few lesser-known thinkers such as Frances Hutcheson and James Beattie wrote that much. The word humor was not used in its current sense of funniness until the 18 th century, we should note, and so traditional discussions were about laughter or comedy. The most that major philosophers like Plato, Hobbes, and Kant wrote about laughter or humor was a few paragraphs within a discussion of another topic. Henri Bergson’s 1900 Laughter was the first book by a notable philosopher on humor. Martian anthropologists comparing the amount of philosophical writing on humor with what has been written o...

Loading... The following article on Nazi eugenics is an excerpt from Richard Weikart’s book The origins of eugenics beliefs Hitler’s views on eugenics were based on social policies that placed the biological improvement of the Aryan Race, or the Germanic “master race” through eugenics at the center of Nazi belief. But Hitler did not create these views. He merely put into policy ideas that circulated throughout the western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Loading... The roots of Nazi ideology were found in Darwin, Nietzsche, and philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They made their way to Hitler by way of Julius Friedrich Lehmann, a Munich publisher specializing in medical texts, as well as works disseminating scientific racism and eugenics. Lehmann befriended Hitler in the early 1920s and sent him inscribed copies of many of the racist books churned out by his publishing house, including books that popularized racist anthropology. Lehmann also published the journal Deutschlands Erneuerung ( Germany’s Renewal), which was filled with articles promoting racism and eugenics. In a March 1922 circular, Hitler recommended that Nazi Party members read this journal, and in 1924 he published an article in it himself (in part because the Nazi press had been banned in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch). Hitler’s views of eugenics in his own words In his two books, Hitler discussed evolutionary theory as vital to his theory of racial struggle and eugenics. ...

Racism fueled Nazi ideology and policies. The Nazis viewed the world as being divided up into competing inferior and superior races, each struggling for survival and dominance. They believed the Jews were not a religious denomination, but a dangerous non-European “race.” Nazi racism would produce murder on an unprecedented scale. • 1 Racists believe that innate, inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. In the early twentieth-century, such views on race were widely accepted in many parts of the world. In fact, race is not biologically based, it is a cultural classification of groups. • 2 According to Nazi theories of race, Germans and other Europeans had perceived superior physical and mental traits. They considered European peoples to be “Aryans,” descended from the ancient Indo-Europeans who settled throughout the European continent as well as in Iran and India. • 3 Racial antisemitism is the prejudice against or hatred of Jews based on false scientific theories. This aspect of racism was always an integral part of Nazism. Racists are people who believe that innate, inherited characteristics biologically determine human behavior. The doctrine of racism asserts that blood determines national-ethnic identity. Within a racist framework, the value of a human being is not determined by his or her individuality, but instead by membership in a so-called "racial collective nation." Many intellectuals, including scientists, have lent pseudoscientific suppor...