Unit III Vocabulary
Humanities II (online)
27 April 2013

1. Mass Culture- The importance of this term is that mass culture has usually been understood as part of Western capitalist societies and is thus predicated upon notions of individualism and consumption as well as deception. It began when Russia started experiencing major problems as well as mass migrations from the countryside. This was when the tools and products of mass culture became more effective. The course ends in 1934, once the political, social, and economic arrangements of the Soviet Union had been definite and victory affirmed in the struggle to build socialism. John French Sloan from the Ashcan school is good example of this term because of what he accomplished including other visual artists.

2. Epic Theater- This term gets its importance from being used to describe the style and techniques promoted in Germany after World War I. Speaking about the influence by the fear of World War I's human cost is what made this term so easy for me to understand and remember. Also by the suffering of the middle and lower classes during the postwar recessions of the 1920's and the Great Depression, I could remember the term. An example to go along with this term would be Bertolt Brecht. Although his first plays were written in Germany during the 1920s, he was not commonly recognized until much later. One of his most popular pieces was Leben des Galilei, which meant The Life of Galileo.

3. Logical Positivism- Shortly after the end of the first World War is when a large group of mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers began meeting in Vienna to discuss the allegations of recent progresses in logic. This connection to the era is the connection of importance of the term. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were two examples of known people that helped to create this theory. These men delivered the positivists with influential new tools for evolving Empiricist views of scientific awareness.

4. Existentialism- Existentialism, in its currently recognizable 20th century form, was inspired by Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. Many may be surprised at the mention of humanism in this connection, but we shall try to see in what sense we understand it. In any case, we can begin by saying that existentialism, in our sense of the word, is a doctrine that does render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity. Because existentialism is treated as a “lived” philosophy that is understood and explored through how one lives one’s life rather than a “system” that must be studied from books, it is not unexpected that much existentialist thought can be found in literary form (novels, plays) and not just in the traditional philosophical treatises. Indeed, some of the most important examples of existentialist writing are literary rather than purely philosophical.
5. I.M. Pei- Mr. Pei's personal architectural