|
|
| Line 1: |
Line 1: |
| − | {{Ready}}[[The Rime of the Ancient Mariner]]
| |
| | | | |
| − | [[Image:Hedgehogandfox.JPG|200px|right]]
| |
| − |
| |
| − | "'''The Hedgehog and the Fox'''" is the title of an essay by [[Isaiah Berlin]], regarding the [[Russia|Russian]] author [[Leo Tolstoy|Leo Tolstoy's]] theory of [[history]].
| |
| − |
| |
| − | The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the [[Ancient Greece|ancient Greek]] poet [[Archilochus]]: πόλλ οἶδ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα ("The [[fox]] knows many things, but the [[hedgehog]] knows one big thing." In [[Desiderius Erasmus|Erasmus Rotterdamus's]] [[Adagia]] from 1500, the expression is recorded as ''Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum''.)
| |
| − |
| |
| − | Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include [[Dante]], [[Plato]], [[Lucretius]], [[Blaise Pascal|Pascal]], [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]], [[Fyodor Dostoevsky|Dostoevsky]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], [[Henrik Ibsen|Ibsen]], and [[Marcel Proust|Proust]]) and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]], [[Herodotus]], [[Aristotle]], [[Michel de Montaigne|Montaigne]], [[Erasmus]], [[Molière]], [[Johann Wolfgang Goethe|Goethe]], [[Aleksandr Pushkin|Pushkin]], [[Honoré de Balzac|Balzac]], and [[James Joyce|Joyce]]).
| |
| − |
| |
| − | Turning to Tolstoy, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of these two groups. He postulates, rather, that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog, and thus Tolstoy's own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of [[history]] that Tolstoy presents in his novel ''[[War and Peace]]''.
| |
| − |
| |
| − | The essay has been published separately and as part of the collection ''Russian Thinkers'', edited by [[Henry Hardy]] and [[Aileen Kelly]].
| |
| − |
| |
| − | Some authors, for instance [[Michael Walzer]], have used the same pattern of description on Berlin, as a person who knows many things, compared to the purported narrowness of many other contemporary [[political philosophy|political philosophers]]. Berlin's former student, Canadian philosopher [[Charles Taylor (philosopher)|Charles Taylor]], has been dubbed a hedgehog by Berlin and readily admits to it in an interview after receiving the Templeton Prize 2007. [http://www.templeton.org/questions/spiritual_thinking/]
| |
| − |
| |
| − | Berlin expanded on this concept in the 1997 book <i>The Proper Study of Mankind</i>.
| |
| − |
| |
| − | Philip Tetlock, a political psychology professor in the Haas Business school at UC-Berkeley, draws heavily on this distinction in his exploration of the accuracy of experts and forecasters in various fields (especially politics) in his 2005 book <i>Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?</i>.
| |
| − |
| |
| − | ==External link==
| |
| − | *[http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/ The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library] - The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust. Retrieved November 20, 2007.
| |
| − |
| |
| − | [[Category:Art, music, literature, sports and leisure]]
| |
| − | [[Category:Literature]]
| |
| − | {{DEFAULTSORT:Hedgehog and the Fox, The}}
| |
| − |
| |
| − | {{credit|166767269}}
| |
