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[Terrance]

THE LAW OF CONTRADICTION

            What is the Law of Contradiction?

         Law of Contradiction and Law of Knowledge

"Now the best established of all principles
             may be stated as follows: The same attribute
             cannot at the same time belong and not
             belong to the same subject in the same
             respect ... This I repeat, is the most certain
of
             all principles..." (Aristotle in Metaphysics). 
             "There is a principle in existing things about
             which we cannot make a mistake; of which,
             on the contrary, we must always realize the
             truth -- that the same thing cannot at one and
             the same time be and not be, nor admit of
             any other similar pair of opposites..."
             (Aristotle in Metaphysics). 
             "The most certain principle of all is that
             regarding which it is impossible to be
             mistaken; for such a principle must be both
             the best known ... and non-hypothetical. For
             a principle which every one must have who
             understands anything that is, is not a
             hypothesis; and that which every one must
             know who knows anything ... Evidently then
             such a principle is the most certain of all ...
It
             is, that the same attribute cannot at the
             same time belong and not belong to the
             same subject and in the same respect."
             [Aristotle in Metaphysics] 

         Aristotle is reported to have written this in his
         Metaphysics. Aristotle further said that "everyone
         in argument relies upon this ultimate law, on which
         all others rest." He said this principle or law of
logic
         "must be known if one is to know anything at all."
         He also said, "if everything is and at the same
time
         is not, all opinions must be true."


RATIONALIZATION OR ROUTINIZATION AND THE CHARISMATIC HERO

The world of modernity, Weber stressed over and over again,
has been deserted by
the gods. Man has chased them away and has rationalized and
made calculable and
predictable what in an earlier age had seemed governed by
chance, but also by
feeling, passion, and commitment, by personal appeal and
personal fealty, by grace
and by the ethics of charismatic heroes.

Weber attempted to document this development in a variety of
institutional areas.
His studies in the sociology of religion were meant to trace
the complicated and
tortuous ways in which the gradual "rationalization of
religious life" had led to the
displacement of magical procedure by wertrational
systematizations of man's
relation to the divine. He attempted to show how prophets
with their charismatic
appeals had undermined priestly powers based on tradition;
how with the emergence
of "book religion" the final systematization and
rationalization of the religious sphere
had set in, which found its culmination in the Protestant
Ethic.