World Socionics

  Gore Vidal (Eugene Luther Gore Vidal) was an American writer of novels, essays, stage plays and scripts for television and cinema, active from the 1940s to the 2000s. Towards the end of his life he became better known as a political polemicist in essays, interviews and speeches, mostly denouncing what he called "the national security state" in the US.  He was on occasion a political candidate, running unsuccessfully as a Democrat in 1960 for Congress in what was then New York's 29th District, and in 1982 in the California primaries for the US Senate. During his 1960 campaign, he actually came up with the concept of what would later become the Peace Corps, introduced by President Kennedy. As a writer, Vidal was best known for such bestselling novels as The City and the Pillar (1948), Julian (1964), Myra Breckingridge  (1968), Burr (1973), Creation (1981) and  Lincoln (1984). His last novel was The Golden Age (2000). In his later years he focused increasingly...

Louis XV was King of France and Navarre from 1715, when he was five years old, until his death in 1774 at the age of sixty-four. He was the fourth king of the House of Bourbon, ascending the throne on the death of his great-grandfather, King Louis XIV (LSI) . It was during his reign that France consolidated its present European borders. Unlike his immediate predecessor and successor, Louis XV's reign and legacy are controversial and are often reevaluated. While Louis XIV is easily defined as the king who relentlessly pushed for increasing the power of the monarchy and for wars aiming at expanding French territory and power, and Louis XVI (LII)  is the king who ineptly drifted into revolution and lost his head, Louis XV is far more difficult to assess. He has been considered the king chiefly responsible for the collapse of the prestige of the French monarchy - thus passing on to his successor an impossible legacy - due to the scandal of his private life and the perceived failure...

Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in the city of Ephesus, at the time part of the Persian Empire. In his most active period around 500 BCE, Heraclitus postulated a distinguishing theory which he called "Logos" or an ora torical method used to convince or persuasion through logic. He is famously known for his central dogma of philosophy, universal flux, unity of opposites and that fire is element that comprises everything in the universe. The supposed interpretation of these doctrines has been the subject of controversy for historians, since his original inference often drawn from this theory that in the world as Heraclitus conceived - that these contradictory propositions must be true. What interested Heraclitus the most in philosophy was metaphysics and epistemology, which is a very internal subject, which thus gave way for Heraclitus to implore it with absolute confidence in detached monologues that took the form of a perplexing riddle or puzzle. ...

Avram Noam Chomsky  is an American linguist, philosopher, social critic and political activist. An Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Chomsky's main contributions lie in the field of linguistics, with his revolutionary ideas on 'Universal Grammar', 'Transformational Generative Grammar', the 'Chomsky Hierarchy' and more recently, the 'Minimalist Program'. Secondly, he has contributed in political activism, widely publicising his ideas and critiques within a libertarian socialist and anarcho-syndicalist paradigm. Chomsky's academic success has only been matched by the controversy of his anti-establishment political views. First, we should look at Chomsky's contributions to Linguistics. His contributions focused largely on 'biolinguistics', i.e. where the basic structures of language are thought to occur innately within all human beings. This is the basis of his 'Universal Grammar' (...

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the Shah of Iran during 1941 to 1979. He was eventually overthrown by the events of the Iranian Revolution, and was the last monarch of the House of Pahlavi. As a young boy, Mohammad was described by family and royal members as quiet, reserved and fearful. Primed very early by his father to take the throne, signs of Mohammad’s apparent inadequacy to take the position for the country was reinforced by his father’s lack of confidence. One of the Shah’s biographers, Marvin Zonis speaks of how Mohammad was viewed in the documentary 'The Last Shah': “He was a frightened young boy who was always belittled by his father…Reza Shah always said - my son can’t carry on after me, he’s not tough enough to do this. He needs to be more like me to hold this country together – so the boy always felt inadequate in regards to this giant figure". Even with these apparent differences between father and son, Mohammad was primed to be the successor of the throne....

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher whose comprehensive and systematic work in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics greatly influenced all subsequent philosophy, especially the various schools of Kantianism and idealism. Born in 1724 in Königsberg, at that time a part of Prussia, Kant grew up in a small, rural household that never had much money. Kant happily accepted his economic condition early on, which served as an inspiration for his ideas on how to live a modest and temperate life. However, it wasn't until he was in his fifties that he became an affluent professor at the University of Konigsberg and adapted to middle-class life. At that time, although he was not religious, he was acutely aware of how much religion had helped his parents’ ability to cope hardship and the practicality of religion in reinforcing and fostering social cohesion. Kant was writing at a highly interesting period in history we now know as The Enlightenment. In an essay called What is Enlightenm...