title: Possession (1981 film)

text: In the years following its release, "Possession" accrued a cult following. Film scholar Bartłomiej Paszylk deemed it "one of the most enigmatic and uncompromising horror movies in the history of cinema." Writer Kim Newman considers "Possession" to be a "kitsch film", noting: "Zulawski takes his film too seriously, but it's fun all the same ... [he] goes mad with his swooping camera, has everything in shot painted in blue and encourages his stars to attack their roles with a kind of stylised hysteria rare outside Japanese theatre." Newman also likened elements of Adjani's character to that of Samantha Eggar in "The Brood" (1979). Tom Huddleston of "Time Out" gave the perfect-star rating, and wrote "There are plenty of movies which seem to have been made by madmen. "Possession" may be the only film in existence which is itself mad: unpredictable, horrific, its moments of terrifying lucidity only serving to highlight the staggering derangement at its core. Extreme but essential viewing." Similarly, "Slant Magazine"s Budd Wilkins gave the film 4/4 stars, saying that "Many directors have taken full advantage of Adjani's exotic, ethereal French beauty; only Zulawski saw beyond the exquisite surface to something unsettling. Most disconcerting is the way Adjani can register almost demonic ill-intent while never losing some trace of the alluring." Ben Sachs from "Chicago Reader" called it a "confounding masterpiece".


title: Possession (1981 film)

text: Michael Brooke of "Sight & Sound" commented in 2011, "Although it's easy to see why it was pigeonholed as a horror film, its first half presents what is still one of the most viscerally vivid portraits of a disintegrating relationship yet committed to film, comfortably rivalling Lars von Trier's "Antichrist", David Cronenberg's "The Brood" and Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage"." Reviewing the Blu-ray release of the film in 2013, Michael Dodd of "Bring The Noise" was similarly impressed with what he called "an intense exploration of marital breakdown". He argued that this made "Possession" "one of the few horror films that successfully builds a back story for its main characters". Reviewing the film's Blu-ray release, Andrew Pollard of the British magazine "Starburst" rated the film eight out of ten stars, calling it "a visceral, violent, erratic and piercing effort that pokes and prods its audience any chance it gets"; Pollard would also praise the performances of Adjani and Neill, practical effects and unsettling tone.


title: Possession (1981 film)

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 85% of 34 critic reviews are positive for "Possession", and the average rating is 8 out of 10. Its consensus reads, "Blending genres as effectively as it subverts expectations, "Possession" uses powerful acting and disquieting imagery to grapple with complex themes." On Metacritic, the film earned a weighted average score of 75 out of 100, based on 10 reviews, signifying "generally favorable reviews".


title: Lada Riva

text: The Lada / VAZ-2105, 2104 and 2107, collectively marketed as Lada Riva for right-hand drive models (in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand), the Lada Nova in Germany, and by multiple other names and markets, are a series of compact sedans of the "Zhiguli" line-up (Fiat 124-based cars), built by Russian car manufacturer AvtoVAZ (formerly VAZ). Introduced in 1979 in the Soviet Union, and progressively introduced to Western European and global markets from the early 1980s, under the Lada brand, they were sold as saloons (2105 and 2107), and station wagon (2104) versions.


title: Lada Riva

text: Today they are generally referred to as the Lada Classic series, being derived from the original Fiat 124 platform which has been the now-iconic mainstay of the AvtoVAZ lineup since the company's foundation in the late 1960s. Russian production at the company's main plant at Togliatti ended in September 2012.


title: Lada Riva

text: Along with the other Fiat 124 derivatives, it is the world's third best selling, single generation automobile platform, after the Volkswagen Beetle and the Ford Model T, and one of the longest production run platforms alongside the Volkswagen Beetle, the Hindustan Ambassador, the Volkswagen (Type 2) Bus, and the Toyota 70 Series.


title: Lada Riva

text: Although introduced in 1979 and first produced in quantity in 1980, the Riva's origins are older: it is a modernised and restyled version of the original Lada type VAZ-2101 "Zhiguli" saloon, which was introduced in 1970 as a modified license copy of the Fiat 124. VAZ began development work on the facelift version as early as 1975, and the first prototypes were built in 1977, although it would not be until 1983 – three years after its release in the Soviet Union – that the car was made available in Western European markets.


title: Lada Riva

text: The Riva itself is officially designated – and known in the home market – as VAZ-2105 (base saloon [sedan]), VAZ-2104 (station wagon), and VAZ-2107 (deluxe saloon identified by the large chromed grille). In Russia, VAZ-2105, VAZ-2104, and VAZ-2107 are considered to be different cars rather than variants but nonetheless all of them are part of a single "Klassika" ("Classic") family along with older models such as the VAZ-2101. They are popularly known as Pyatyorka ("the five"), Chetvyorka ("the four") and Semyorka ("the seven").


title: Lada Riva

text: Mechanically, the car is virtually identical to the first-generation VAZ-2101, featuring the Fiat-derived manual transmissions, coil spring suspension all round, and aluminium alloy drum brakes with cast iron brake shoes on the rear wheels. The smaller-engined variant, the version (VAZ-2105) had a revamp of its inline four-cylinder compared to the original VAZ-2101 (Lada 1200). The old OHC design had its camshaft driven by chain, while the new one had a toothed belt drive. Some modifications of the Riva's larger-engined version (VAZ-2107) carried on with the chain-driven OHC engine coming over from the original Lada 1500 (VAZ-2103), while others had a later 1,6L VAZ-2106/21067 engine. Another change was made to the engine in 1992, when single point fuel injection and catalytic converters were specified to keep up with emissions legislation.


title: Lada Riva

text: The 2107 was announced in 1982, offered as the luxury version (and the most expensive), with improved interior (including front headrests), a new instrument panel, and a chrome grille; it came with either (21072) or (21074) engines. (The 21079 was a Wankel engined version.)


title: Lada Riva

text: The first 2104 station wagon appeared in 1984, in three models: the 2104 with ; the 21041 with ; and the 21043 with (VAZ-2103) engine.


title: Lada Riva

text: Export sales proved to be very good in Eastern Europe. In the West, Rivas had limited presence in such countries as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, New Zealand (where it served as a taxi), and Canada. In Finland, they had much larger sales due to the fact that Finland had closer economic ties with the Soviet Union. Canada was the only market to offer whitewall tires. Canadian 2107s were "briefly sold as the Dennis Signet", after the importer, Peter Dennis Motor Corporation. Canadian sales, along with several European markets, ended on 4 July 1997.


title: Lada Riva

text: Tightening safety and emissions legislation combined with the economic instability in the former Soviet Union during the 1990s led to the Riva being withdrawn from most Western European markets by 1997, although it remained in production at the AvtoVAZ factory in the Russian Federation and was sold as the Lada Classic. It was one of the cheapest automobiles available in the Russian market and remains the most popular second-hand car in Russia even after its production ceased.


title: Lada Riva

text: In 2002, production of the wagon model was taken over by Izh, before assembly was also started at the Bogdan Group's LuAZ plant, and later in Cherkasy, Ukraine. The 2107 model was produced also at the ZAZ factory in Ukraine and at Suzuki's factory in Egypt. In August 2011, Russian production of the 2107 was moved to Izh. After about thirty years of production, the 2105 was discontinued in 2010, followed by the 2104 and 2107 in 2012.


title: Lada Riva

text: The British market was opened with the 1300GL in 1983, and the 21051 (Riva 1200L) had the . British sales were based heavily on low sales price and durability. In 1986, 20,000 Ladas were sold in Britain, 30,000 in 1988. British imports of the older VAZ-2101/2102/2106 ended soon after the Riva's introduction, although they remained available in the Soviet Union and much of the old Eastern Bloc for several years afterwards.


title: Lada Riva

text: In a review of the new economy car, the British automobile magazine "Autocar" noted its low price of only £3,158 (£10,736.82 in 2020), improved road performance and an "impressive list of standard equipment", which included "height-adjustable headlamps, internally adjustable driver's door mirror, velour-covered seats, heated rear window, illumination lights for bonnet and boot", and a 21-piece toolkit. However, its spartan interiors and aging design meant that it was never aimed at buyers of market leaders' similar-sized but more expensive products, such as the Ford Sierra, Vauxhall Cavalier and Austin Montego. Nonetheless, the Riva was still selling well in the United Kingdom and many other Western markets in the early 1990s, but the next few years saw a raft of new models come from budget competitors such as Daewoo, Hyundai, Kia and Proton, pushing Riva sales into terminal decline. This, combined with the economic hardships and much-needed investment to adapt cars to stricter European Union emissions requirements not being available, resulted in the decision to withdraw Lada from the UK (and some other European markets) and Canada on 4 July 1997. They had cheaply tried to produce catalytic converter equipped cars (EU mandated from 1992) using carburettors, when all other car makers changed to fuel injection to more accurately control fuel/air ratios. However the catalysts were quickly destroyed as a result and most cars failed their first MOT test (at three years old) as a result.


title: Lada Riva

text: Despite Lada's withdrawal in 1997 from the British market, most of the surviving Rivas on UK roads were not scrapped; rather the vast majority were re-exported back to Russia due to a shortage of used examples in their homeland and the export specification was considered superior to those that were available domestically. Even in 2021, many ex-UK right hand drive Rivas are still operating in Russia and the former Soviet states.


title: Lada Riva

text: The car was also sold in New Zealand, where it was distributed by the New Zealand Dairy Board. The Dairy Board received the cars in lieu of cash payments for deliveries of mutton and butter to the Soviet Union. The last such trade was carried out in 1990.


title: Lada Riva

text: Model variants included the Riva Signet, Riva 1200, Riva 1300, Riva 1500, and Riva 1600, with trim levels "E" and "L". A Turbo charged model Lada 2107 Turbo was sold in Finland, this version was made by Finnish Lada importer.


title: Lada Riva

text: Small numbers of Lada rally cars were built with Wankel engines, fitted with a pair of Weber DCOE twin-choke carburettors.


title: Lada Riva

text: In Egypt, the Amal Foreign Trade Company and Lada's parent company AvtoVAZ signed a joint venture agreement to assemble Ladas for the North African market in 2000. However, as they did not have their own factory, space was found at a local Suzuki plant in Cairo to assemble the 2107 version of the Riva. As of 2006, production continued at Suzuki until 2015 with an additional model, the 2110, being produced.


title: Lada Riva

text: In the early 1980s, when it was put into production, the car complied with UNECE car safety standards and GOST technical standards.


title: Lada Riva

text: In 2001, the 2107 version of the Riva scored 0 points out of 16 in a frontal crash test conducted by the modern Russian ARCAP safety assessment program, and was awarded zero stars out of four. The reviewers noted that the result of the test was easily predictable and couldn't be positive, as they were dealing with an old car having an outdated construction of the body and designed at the time when safety tests were different from those of 2001.


title: Lada Riva

text: In 2002 Za Rulyom magazine performed crash tests on two Lada 21053 models, a new car from 2002 and a used one from 1994. The magazine's experts noted that the newer model complied with UNECE car safety standards 12-03 and 33, but the older and used one failed the latter standard. The story also expressed doubt that the 2002 model could meet the stricter safety requirements that would be imposed in October of the same year.


title: Lada Riva

text: In the 2010s, the sales of the Lada Classics remained strong in the car's native Russia and some of the former Eastern Bloc nations. In April 2011, it was reported that Russian sales of the 2105 and 2107 series showed an increase of 140% on a total of 28,633 in the first quarter of the year. However, production of the 2105 ceased at AvtoVAZ's Togliatti plant at the end of 2010 after a 30-year production run and nearly 3,000,000 units, with production of the other variants being fully moved to the IzhAvto plant near Izhevsk.


title: Lada Riva

text: The 2107 made the transition to the IzhAvto plant in August 2011, thus marking the end of production of the original Fiat 124 derived models at Togliatti after a 41-year production run and over 14 million units.


title: Lada Riva

text: In September 2012, the history of the sedan model in Russia was over, when the last 2104 came off the IzhAvto assembly lines. The last unit of the Lada Classic series, a 2104 model, was produced by IzhAvto on 17 September 2012. Starting from the same month, production at the Izhevsk factory was replaced with the Lada Granta. However, , the 2107 model was still in production in Egypt.


title: Manslaughter

text: Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th century BC.


title: Manslaughter

text: In voluntary manslaughter, the offender had intent to kill or seriously harm, but acted "in the moment" under circumstances that could cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed. There are mitigating circumstances that reduce culpability, such as when the defendant kills only with an intent to cause serious bodily harm. Voluntary manslaughter in some jurisdictions is a lesser included offense of murder. The traditional mitigating factor was provocation; however, others have been added in various jurisdictions.


title: Manslaughter

text: The most common type of voluntary manslaughter occurs when a defendant is provoked to commit homicide. This is sometimes described as a crime of passion. In most cases, the provocation must induce rage or anger in the defendant, although some cases have held that fright, terror, or desperation will suffice.


title: Manslaughter

text: In some places, including parts of the United States, assisted suicide is punishable as manslaughter.


title: Manslaughter

text: In other countries such as Switzerland and Canada, and in some U.S. states, as long as legal safeguards are observed, assisted suicide is legal.


title: Manslaughter

text: Involuntary manslaughter is the killing of a human being without intent of doing so, either expressed or implied. It is distinguished from voluntary manslaughter by the absence of intention. It is normally divided into two categories, constructive manslaughter and criminally negligent manslaughter, both of which involve criminal liability.


title: Manslaughter

text: Constructive manslaughter is also referred to as "unlawful act" manslaughter. It is based on the doctrine of constructive malice, whereby the malicious intent inherent in the commission of a crime is considered to apply to the consequences of that crime. It occurs when someone kills, without intent, in the course of committing an unlawful act. The malice involved in the crime is transferred to the killing, resulting in a charge of manslaughter.


title: Manslaughter

text: For example, a person who fails to stop at a red traffic light while driving a vehicle and hits someone crossing the street could be found to intend or be reckless as to assault or criminal damage (see "DPP v Newbury"). There is no intent to kill, and a resulting death would not be considered murder, but would be considered involuntary manslaughter. The accused's responsibility for causing death is constructed from the fault in committing what might have been a minor criminal act. Reckless driving or reckless handling of a potentially lethal weapon may result in a death that is deemed manslaughter. The "DPP v Newbury" case had redefined the meaning of murder in the Australian constitution, and reformed in order to include a "mens rea" assessment.


title: Manslaughter

text: Involuntary manslaughter may be distinguished from accidental death. A person who is driving carefully, but whose car nevertheless hits a child darting out into the street, has not committed manslaughter. A person who pushes off an aggressive drunk, who then falls and dies, has probably not committed manslaughter, although in some jurisdictions it may depend whether "excessive force" was used or other factors.


title: Manslaughter

text: As manslaughter is not defined by legislation in Australia, common law decisions provide the basis for determining whether an act resulting in death amounts to manslaughter by unlawful and dangerous act. To be found guilty of manslaughter by an unlawful and dangerous act, the accused must be shown to have committed an unlawful act which is contrary to the criminal law, and that a reasonable person in the position of the accused would have known that by their act, they were exposing the victim to an "appreciable risk of serious injury".


title: Manslaughter

text: Criminally negligent manslaughter is variously referred to as criminally negligent homicide in the United States, and gross negligence manslaughter in England and Wales. In Scotland and some Commonwealth of Nations jurisdictions the offence of culpable homicide might apply.


title: Manslaughter

text: It occurs where death results from serious negligence, or, in some jurisdictions, serious recklessness. A high degree of negligence is required to warrant criminal liability. A related concept is that of willful blindness, which is where a defendant intentionally puts themselves in a position where they will be unaware of facts which would render them liable.


title: Manslaughter

text: Criminally negligent manslaughter occurs where there is an omission to act when there is a duty to do so, or a failure to perform a duty owed, which leads to a death. The existence of the duty is essential because the law does not impose criminal liability for a failure to act unless a specific duty is owed to the victim. It is most common in the case of professionals who are grossly negligent in the course of their employment. An example is where a doctor fails to notice a patient's oxygen supply has disconnected and the patient dies ("R v Adomako" and "R v Perreau"). Another example could be leaving a child locked in a car on a hot day.


title: Manslaughter

text: In some jurisdictions, such as some U.S. States, there exists the specific crime of vehicular or intoxication manslaughter. An equivalent in Canada is causing death by criminal negligence under the Criminal Code, punishable by a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.


title: Manslaughter

text: On the "mens rea", or state of mind, or the circumstances under which the killing occurred (mitigating factors), manslaughter is usually broken down into two distinct categories: "voluntary manslaughter" and "involuntary manslaughter". However, this is not the case in all jurisdictions, for example, in the U.S. state of Florida.


title: Manslaughter

text: In some jurisdictions, such as the U.K., Canada, and some Australian states, "adequate provocation" may be a partial defense to a charge of murder, which, if accepted by the jury, would convert what might otherwise have been a murder charge into manslaughter.


title: Manslaughter

text: In Australia, specifically New South Wales, manslaughter is referred to, however not defined, in the "Crimes Act 1900" (NSW).


title: Manslaughter

text: Manslaughter exists in two forms in New South Wales: Voluntary or Involuntary Manslaughter. In New South Wales, in cases of voluntary manslaughter, both the "actus reus" (literally guilty act) and "mens rea" (literally guilty mind) for murder are proven but the defendant has a partial defence, such as extreme provocation or diminished responsibility. In cases of involuntary manslaughter, the "actus reus" for murder is present but there is insufficient "mens rea" to establish such a charge.


title: Manslaughter

text: There are two categories of involuntary manslaughter at common law: manslaughter by unlawful and dangerous act and manslaughter by criminal negligence. The authority for the "actus reus" and "mens rea" of involuntary manslaughter by an unlawful and dangerous act is the High Court of Australia case of "Wilson v R". This case determined that the act that caused the death must breach the criminal law and that the act must carry an appreciable risk of serious injury ("actus reus"). Regarding the "mens rea", the court held that the accused must intend to commit the unlawful act and that a reasonable person in the position of the accused would have realised or recognised that the act carried an appreciable risk of serious injury. Manslaughter by criminal negligence, on the other hand, finds its authority in the Victorian case of "Nydam v R", confirmed by the High Court of Australia in "R v Lavender" and "Burns v R". In "Nydam v R", the Court described the office at [445] in the following terms:In order to establish manslaughter by criminal negligence, it is sufficient if the prosecution shows that the act which caused the death was done by the accused consciously and voluntarily, without any intention of causing death or grievous bodily harm but in circumstances which involved such a great falling short of the standard of care which a reasonable man would have exercised and which involved such a high risk that death or grievous bodily harm would follow that the doing of the act merited criminal punishment.


title: Manslaughter

text: Canadian law distinguishes between justifiable, accidental and culpable homicide. If a death is deemed a culpable homicide, it generally falls under one of four categories (first-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter, and infanticide).


title: Manslaughter

text: Canadian law defines manslaughter as "a homicide committed without the intention to cause death, although there may have been an intention to cause harm". There are two broad categories of manslaughter: unlawful act, and criminal negligence.


title: Manslaughter

text: Unlawful act is when a person commits a crime that unintentionally results in the death of another person.


title: Manslaughter

text: Criminal negligence is when the homicide was the result of an act that showed wanton or reckless disregard for the lives of others.


title: Manslaughter

text: In English law, manslaughter is a less serious offence than murder. In England and Wales, the usual practice is to prefer a charge of murder, with the judge or defence able to introduce manslaughter as an option (see lesser included offence). The jury then decides whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty of either murder or manslaughter. Manslaughter may be either voluntary or involuntary, depending on whether the accused has the required for murder.


title: Manslaughter

text: Voluntary manslaughter occurs when the defendant avails themself of the three statutory defenses described in the Homicide Act 1957 (provocation, diminished responsibility, and a suicide pact).


title: Manslaughter

text: Involuntary manslaughter occurs when the agent has no intention () of committing murder, but caused the death of another through recklessness or criminal negligence. The crime of involuntary manslaughter can be subdivided into two main categories: constructive manslaughter and gross negligence manslaughter.


title: Manslaughter

text: Manslaughter is a crime in the United States. Definitions can vary among jurisdictions, but the U.S. follows the general principle that manslaughter involves causing the death of another person in a manner less culpable than murder, and observes the distinction between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.


title: Manslaughter

text: Some civil law jurisdictions, such as the French Code, use "murder" or "involuntary homicide" to cover the crime of manslaughter, and reserve "assassination" for the crime of premeditated murder.


title: Manslaughter

text: A legal distinction between intentional and unintentional homicide was introduced in Athenian law in 409 BC, when the legal code of Draco indicated that intentional homicide ("hekousios phonos" or "phonos ek pronoias") was punishable by death. The language is ambiguous as to unintentional homicide ("akousios phonos"), but it may have been punishable by exile. However, academic David D Phillips says that these categories "do not correspond to the common-law categories of murder and manslaughter either in their original significance or in their present definitions", because under Athenian law intentional homicide would include both murder and voluntary manslaughter.


title: Manslaughter

text: Anglo-Saxon law recognised particular degrees of homicide, with the worst being "forsteall" (killing by ambush). "Murdra" was a separate type of aggravated (secret) homicide under Anglo-Saxon law; William the Conqueror defined it narrowly as a fine that would be charged on a hundred following the slaying of a foreigner (originally a Norman, but intermarriage would end the distinction between Normans and English by the 13th century). By 1348, the association between "murdrum" and malice aforethought emerged.


title: Manslaughter

text: "Manslaughter" as a general term for homicide was in use in medieval England by the late 1200s, during which time a distinction was forming between homicide committed in necessary self-defence (pardoned without culpability) and homicide committed by accident (pardoned but with moral blame). From 1390, homicide in necessary self-defence or by misadventure became "pardons of course", meaning that the Chancery would issue them by default. Homicide in necessary self-defence would later be acquitted, rather than pardoned. The use of "manslaughter" to cover homicides other than murder emerged by 1547, in a statute. Edward Coke confirms this distinction in "The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England," which remains "the authoritative starting point for any examination of the law of homicide" in the United Kingdom and other common law countries"."


title: Roy O. Disney

text: Roy Oliver Disney (; June 24, 1893 – December 20, 1971) was an American businessman and co-founder of The Walt Disney Company. He was the older brother of Walt Disney and the father of Roy E. Disney.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: Disney was born to Irish-Canadian Elias Charles Disney and English-German-American Flora Call Disney in Chicago, Illinois. The family moved to Marceline, Missouri and to Kansas City in 1911. On July 1, 1911, Elias purchased a newspaper delivery route for "The Kansas City Star". It extended from 27th Street to the 31st Street, and from Prospect Avenue to Indiana Avenue. Roy and his brother, Walt worked as newspaper delivery-boys. The family delivered the morning newspaper, "The Kansas City Times," to approximately 700 customers, and "The Kansas City Star" to more than 600. The number of customers served increased with time.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: Disney graduated from the Manual Training High School of Kansas City in 1912. He left the paper delivery route and worked on a farm in the summer. He was then employed as a bank clerk along with brother Raymond Arnold Disney at the First National Bank of Kansas City.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: Disney served in the United States Navy from 1917 to 1919. Roy contracted tuberculosis and was therefore discharged from military duty. He forsook his banking career and hospital bed and in 1923, brother Walt joined Roy in Hollywood and the two planned the start of Disney Brothers Studio. The brothers ordered kit houses from Los Angeles-based Pacific Ready Cut Homes and, in 1928, built their homes adjacently on Lyric Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: While Walt led the creative side, Roy guided the business side and finances. Together Roy and Walt founded Disney Studios as brothers, but Walt later bought out most of Roy's share in 1929 so, unlike Max and Dave Fleischer of rival Fleischer Studios, Roy was not a co-producer. However, Roy was an equal partner in all facets of the production company.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: Disney became the company's first CEO in 1929, although the official title was not given to him until 1966. He also shared the role of chairman of the board with Walt from 1945 and succeeded Walt in the position of President around this time as well. He held the position until 1968 when he handed it to Donn Tatum. In 1960, Walt dropped the chairman title so he could focus more on the creative aspects of the company. Following Walt's death in 1966, Roy postponed his retirement to oversee construction of what was then known as Disney World. He later renamed it Walt Disney World as a tribute to his brother.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: Roy was married to Edna Francis from April 1925 until his death. Roy met Edna Francis in Kansas City, Missouri when she worked at The Kansas City Times along with close friend Meredith A. Boyington and she introduced Meredith to Raymond Arnold Disney, who was an older brother to Roy O. Disney. Raymond and Meredith were married, and were lifetime close friends to Edna and Roy and they had two sons: Charles Elias Disney and Daniel H. Disney. Roy and Edna's son Roy Edward Disney, was born on January 10, 1930. Roy Edward Disney later was vice chairman of The Walt Disney Company. Throughout his life, Roy Oliver Disney rejected the publicity and fame that came with being Walt's brother. Roy's nephew Charles Elias Disney chose to name his son Charles Roy Disney in Roy's honor. Roy remained a member of the Freemasons for decades before he resigned his membership.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: After the opening of Walt Disney World in October 1971, Roy finally retired and died on December 20, 1971, five days after his younger brother's fifth death anniversary, from a stroke, at the age of 78. He is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) next to his wife Edna Francis in Los Angeles.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: One of the Walt Disney World Railroad locomotives was named after Roy. On June 6, 2002, his son Roy E. Disney rededicated this locomotive in his father's honor. In 2016, the locomotive took part in its centennial celebration hosted by the Carolwood Pacific Historical Society. One of the Hong Kong Disneyland Railroad locomotives is also named after Roy.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: The Roy O. Disney Concert Hall, the primary performance space for the Herb Alpert School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts (of which Disney was a benefactor), is named after him.


title: Roy O. Disney

text: A statue of Roy seated on a park bench beside Minnie Mouse is located in the Town Square section of Main Street, U.S.A., at the Magic Kingdom theme park in Florida. A duplicate is located outside the Team Disney building at Disney's corporate headquarters in Burbank, California. There is a third statue at the Tokyo Disneyland theme park. The Roy O. Disney Suite is located on the top floor of the Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael Corleone is a fictional character and the protagonist of Mario Puzo's 1969 novel "The Godfather". In the three "Godfather" films, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Michael was portrayed by Al Pacino, for which he was twice-nominated for Academy Awards. Michael is the youngest son of Vito Corleone, a Sicilian immigrant who builds a Mafia empire. Upon his father's death, Michael succeeds him as the don of the Corleone crime family.


title: Michael Corleone

text: In June 2003, Michael Corleone was recognized as the 11th most iconic villain in film history by the American Film Institute, although some critics consider him to be a tragic hero. The British film magazine "Empire" selected Michael Corleone as the 11th greatest movie character.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Born on March 23, 1920, to Mafia don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and his wife Carmela (Morgana King), Michael has two older brothers, Santino "Sonny" Corleone (James Caan) and Frederico "Fredo" Corleone (John Cazale), and a younger sister, Constanzia "Connie" Corleone (Talia Shire). The family "consigliere", Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), is their informal adopted brother.


title: Michael Corleone

text: In his novel "The Godfather", Mario Puzo introduces Michael with the following physical description: “He did not have the heavy, Cupid-shaped face of [his siblings], and his jet black hair was straight rather than curly. His skin was a clear olive-brown that would have been called beautiful in a girl. He was handsome in a delicate way.” Later in the novel, Puzo writes, “Michael was not tall or heavily built but his presence seemed to radiate danger.”


title: Michael Corleone

text: Unlike his two older brothers, Michael wants nothing to do with the Corleone "family business", wanting instead to lead a more Americanized life. Vito does not want Michael to join the Corleone criminal empire either, hoping that his favorite son would go into politics. Michael was enrolled at Dartmouth College, but dropped out to enlist in the United States Marine Corps the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. During World War II, he fights in the Pacific War, and is wounded in battle. For his bravery, he received a battlefield commission to the rank of Lieutenant, and was awarded the Silver Star and the Navy Cross. He was discharged as a Captain after V-J Day in the fall of 1945. His heroics during the war were featured in "Life" magazine.


title: Michael Corleone

text: During the autumn of 1945, Michael is discharged from the Marines, unaware that Vito secretly arranged for his discharge, using his political influence. Michael returns home to attend his sister Connie's wedding, accompanied by Kay Adams (Diane Keaton), his college sweetheart. Michael stays for a few weeks, intending to re-enter college without telling his family.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Just before Christmas 1945, Vito is critically wounded in an assassination attempt by drug kingpin Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri), pushing a reluctant Michael into the Mafia world he has avoided for so long. Arriving at the hospital, he finds his bedridden father unprotected from potential attack. While awaiting Corleone reinforcements, Michael prevents a second assassination attempt on Vito by Sollozzo, then affirms his loyalty to his father. Captain Mark McCluskey (Sterling Hayden), a corrupt NYPD captain on Sollozzo's payroll, breaks Michael's jaw before more Corleone button men arrive.


title: Michael Corleone

text: As Vito Corleone recuperates, Sollozzo requests that Michael broker a truce, but acting boss Sonny, suspecting a trap, refuses and demands the other Mafia families hand over Sollozzo to the Corleone family or else face war. Michael volunteers to meet Sollozzo in a public place and kill him and McCluskey. Hagen warns that killing McCluskey would violate a long-standing Mafia rule not to kill police officers, and says it would incite deadly backlash from rival Mafia families and law enforcement. Michael argues they can publicly expose McCluskey as a corrupt cop involved in the drug trade and serving as Sollozzo's bodyguard, contending that McCluskey has crossed into their world and is fair game. Sonny agrees and approves the hit.


title: Michael Corleone

text: After careful preparation, Michael meets with Sollozzo and McCluskey at an Italian restaurant in The Bronx. He retrieves a handgun that Corleone "caporegime" Peter Clemenza (Richard Castellano) had planted beforehand in the bathroom and kills Sollozzo and McCluskey by shooting them at point-blank range. This ignites the New York underworld's first Mafia war in a decade.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael escapes to Sicily and spends two years under Corleone ally Don Tommasino's (Corrado Gaipa) protection. Michael falls in love with and marries a young local woman named Apollonia Vitelli (Simonetta Stefanelli). Back in the United States, Sonny is murdered. After Michael is notified of Sonny's murder, he and Apollonia prepare to move to Siracusa, but she is killed by a car bomb meant for Michael, proving the other Mafia families know where he is hiding.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael returns to the United States in 1950 and assumes Sonny's role as Vito's heir apparent. After Vito's suspicions are confirmed that Don Emilio Barzini (Richard Conte), his main rival in New York City, is the mastermind of his shooting and Sonny's murder, he and Michael begin a secret, complex plot to wipe out the other New York Dons. They deliberately allow their rivals to whittle away at Corleone interests to lull them into inaction. Meanwhile, Michael convinces his father that it is time to remove the family from crime. More than a year following his return, Michael reunites with Kay and they marry. He promises her the Corleone family will be completely legitimate in five years. Within three years, they have two children, Anthony and Mary.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Vito semi-retires in 1954, and Michael becomes operating head of the family. He offers to buy out casino owner Moe Greene's (Alex Rocco) stake in the Las Vegas casino that the Corleones bankrolled, intending to move the family to Nevada as part of his effort to legitimize the Corleone interests; Greene refuses to sell. Corleone family "caporegimes" Salvatore Tessio (Abe Vigoda) and Clemenza request permission to begin operating their own families in Corleone territory. Michael, with Vito's support, advises them to be patient and wait until the move to Las Vegas is completed. Tessio and Clemenza agree, but are clearly dissatisfied.


title: Michael Corleone

text: In 1955, Vito warns Michael that Barzini will likely attempt to assassinate Michael under the pretense of negotiating peace between the families, using a disloyal contact within the Corleone regime. Whoever approaches Michael about the meeting, Vito explains, will be the traitor within the family. Shortly thereafter, Vito dies of a heart attack while playing with his grandson Anthony in his tomato garden.


title: Michael Corleone

text: At Vito's funeral, Tessio tells Michael that Barzini wants to arrange a meeting, confirming Vito's prediction. Michael sets his plan in motion to murder the other New York Mafia heads: Barzini, Philip Tattaglia (Victor Rendina), Carmine Cuneo (Rudy Bond), and Victor Stracci (Don Costello), as well as Greene. The plot unfolds on the same day Michael stands as godfather to Connie's newborn son. Later the same day, he has Tessio and Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo), Connie's abusive husband who conspired in Sonny's murder, executed. In one stroke, Michael re-establishes the Corleone family as the nation's most powerful crime family and establishes a reputation as being even more cunning and ruthless than his father.


title: Michael Corleone

text: A few days later, Connie furiously accuses Michael of murdering Carlo. When challenged by Kay, Michael denies having ordered Carlo's murder. Kay, initially believing Michael, later observes him receiving his "capos". Clemenza addresses Michael as "Don Corleone" and kisses his hand in the same manner that he did with Michael's father. Kay realizes Connie's accusations were true, and that Michael has become a powerful Don becoming his father's successor in every way. In the novel, Kay leaves Michael, but Hagen persuades her to return.


title: Michael Corleone

text: "The Godfather Part II" is set in 1958 and 1959. The Corleone family has relocated to Nevada, while "capo" Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo) runs the family's operations in New York, Clemenza having died a few years before. Although Michael is the most powerful Mafia leader in the nation, he still actively works to remove the Corleone family from crime. His efforts have been largely unsuccessful, however, as his many enemies and growing obsession with revenge keep him tethered to the criminal underworld. Michael plans to finally legitimize the family by negotiating with Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), his father's former business partner, over controlling casino operations in Cuba.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Hours after Anthony's First Communion party, unseen gunmen shoot at the Corleone house, nearly killing Michael and Kay. Michael suspects Roth ordered the hit, and believes a mole within the Corleone family aided him. To uncover Roth's involvement, Michael maintains their business relationship, and orders Pentangeli to settle a dispute with Roth's business partners, the Rosato Brothers. When Pentangeli meets with them, they try to kill him, but he survives.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael, Roth, and Fredo travel to Cuba to forge a partnership with Fulgencio Batista allowing them to operate casinos in Cuba without interference in exchange for generous payments to the Cuban government. Michael sends his bodyguard to eliminate Roth on New Year's Eve, but Cuban soldiers kill the bodyguard during the attempt. That same night, Fredo unintentionally reveals that he was the mole within the family; Michael confronts Fredo and gives him the Sicilian "kiss of death". During the New Year's Eve festivities, victorious rebel forces enter Havana, forcing Batista into exile and ruining Michael's plans. Fredo, afraid of his brother, runs off; Roth escapes to Miami.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Meanwhile, Pentangeli, believing Michael had ordered a hit on him, prepares to testify against him in the Senate's investigation of organized crime. However, Michael has Pentangeli's brother Vincenzo (Salvatore Po) brought from Sicily. Just prior to the hearing, Vincenzo and Frank exchange glances. Understanding the threat, Pentangeli recants his earlier sworn statements, throwing the hearings into chaos and effectively destroying the government's case against Michael.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Fredo confesses to Michael that Roth's right-hand man, Johnny Ola (Dominic Chianese), had promised to reward him for information about Michael. Fredo says that he resents being "passed over" to head the family in favor of Michael, and that he withheld key information about the Senate investigation. Michael disowns Fredo, and tells his personal assassin Al Neri that nothing is to happen to his brother while their mother is alive — the implication being that Neri is to kill Fredo after she dies.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Meanwhile, Kay decides to leave Michael and take their children with her, believing Michael will always live in a world of crime and violence. Michael asks her to reconsider, but Kay reveals she aborted their unborn son because she refused to bring another of his children into the world. Enraged, Michael hits Kay in the face and severs ties with her, taking custody of Anthony and Mary.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Following their mother's death, and at Connie's behest, Michael seemingly forgives Fredo, but it is actually a ploy to draw him in closer in order to have him killed. Soon after, Neri murders Fredo on Michael's orders. At the same time, Michael sends Hagen to persuade Pentangeli to commit suicide to spare his family, and has "caporegime" Rocco Lampone (Tom Rosqui) kill a heavily guarded Roth at Idlewild Airport upon his return to the US.


title: Michael Corleone

text: The film ends as Michael recalls a surprise birthday party for his father on December 7, 1941. In a flashback scene, Michael informs the family that he has dropped out of college to enlist in the Marines. Only Fredo supports Michael's decision. When Vito arrives off-screen, everyone goes to greet him except Michael, who sits alone. The film closes with Michael sitting alone in the Corleones' Lake Tahoe compound.


title: Michael Corleone

text: "The Godfather Part III" is set in 1979 and 1980. Michael has moved back to New York, abandoned the Nevada estate, and taken great strides to remove the family from crime.


title: Michael Corleone

text: He turns over his New York criminal interests to longtime enforcer Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna). Ridden with guilt over his ruthless rise to power, particularly his order to eliminate Fredo, Michael uses his expanding wealth in an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation through numerous acts of charity, administered by a foundation named after his father.


title: Michael Corleone

text: A decade earlier, he had given custody of his two children to Kay, who has since remarried. He sells his gambling interests to other Mafia families and reorganizes his vast legitimate business holdings as the "Corleone Group".


title: Michael Corleone

text: The Holy See has named him a Commander of the Order of Saint Sebastian for his charitable works and large donations to Catholic institutions.


title: Michael Corleone

text: At the ceremony, Michael and Kay have an uneasy reunion after nine years. Kay supports their son Anthony's (Franc D'Ambrosio) ambition to reject the "family business" and become an opera singer, and tells Michael that both she and Anthony know the truth about Fredo's death.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael had previously wanted Anthony to either finish law school or join the family business, but now consents to Anthony going his own way.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael's new connection to the Church provides an opportunity to take over the large property company, Immobiliare. He is already its largest shareholder, and offers to buy the Vatican's 25 percent share, which will give him controlling interest. He also takes in Sonny's illegitimate son Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), a soldier in Zasa's crew, as his protégé. Vincent is the son of Sonny Corleone and Lucy Mancini, conceived during the wedding reception which serves as the opening sequence of "The Godfather".


title: Michael Corleone

text: In a private meeting during Michael's reception following his acceptance of the St. Sebastian medal, Vincent accuses Zasa of working against Michael's interests.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael attempts to defuse the conflict, but Vincent attacks Zasa directly, biting off part of his ear.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael recognizes that Vincent has inherited Sonny's fiery temper and fears Vincent will suffer his father's fate, making crucial misjudgments fueled by anger.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael's sister Connie Corleone, who has abandoned her jet-setting socialite lifestyle to live with Michael, now urges him to accept Vincent in Family operations and support him in conflicts against Zasa.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael wryly observes Connie beginning to assume an active role in discussions of illegal family operations. (In "The Godfather, Part II", Connie had still maintained ignorance of, or at least non-involvement in, the family's illegitimate activities.)


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael also disapproves of the romance developing between Vincent and Michael's daughter, Mary (Sofia Coppola).


title: Michael Corleone

text: Apparently dismissing the incestuous aspects of the relationship (first cousins), Michael fears that Vincent's growing involvement in the Mafia will endanger Mary, just as it did Michael's first wife, Apollonia, ultimately leading to her death.


title: Michael Corleone

text: On the night Michael announces he is dissolving his gambling empire, Zasa wipes out most of The Commission in a helicopter attack in Atlantic City.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael escapes with help from Vincent and Neri. Just prior to the attack, Zasa bitterly confronts Michael, signaling open warfare among the mob families.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Believing Zasa too limited to pull off such an ambitious assault, Michael realizes that old Corleone family friend, Don Altobello (Eli Wallach), is the brains behind the attempt on his life. Traumatized by the attack, Michael suffers a diabetic stroke, briefly incapacitating him. (Francis Ford Coppola reveals in his audio commentary that Michael is frequently seen drinking water in the first two films—subtle hints that he is a diabetic.)


title: Michael Corleone

text: With Michael still bedridden, Connie (for the first time assuming a formal role in the Corleone Family's criminal activities) gives Vincent consent to assassinate Zasa.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Disguised as an NYPD mounted officer, Vincent accomplishes this with a brazen horseback attack in the middle of an Italian street festival.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Knowing that escalating mob violence runs the risk of endangering his plan to acquire Immobiliare, a now-recovering Michael is furious when receiving the news of the Zasa hit, and demands that no similar orders be issued while he is alive.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael demands full acceptance to his authority in a hospital room meeting with Neri, Vincent and Connie—implicitly acknowledging Connie's stature as an active participant in Family affairs.


title: Michael Corleone

text: A seemingly healthy Michael returns to Sicily for Anthony's operatic debut at the Teatro Massimo. Suspecting that Altobello may make another attempt on his life, he has Vincent infiltrate Altobello's "regime" under the pretense of defecting.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael and Kay tour Sicily together, during which Michael asks for Kay's forgiveness. Kay admits she will always love him, and they begin to rekindle their relationship.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Meanwhile, the Immobiliare deal has stalled, supposedly because the critically ill Pope Paul VI must personally approve it. Michael learns that the Immobiliare deal is an elaborate swindle concocted by Immobiliare chairman Licio Lucchesi (Enzo Robutti), who schemed with Vatican Bank head Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly) and accountant Frederick Keinszig (Helmut Berger) to embezzle a fortune from the Vatican Bank, using Michael's "investment" to cover their tracks. Hoping to salvage the deal, Michael seeks Don Tommasino's assistance. He directs Michael to Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Vallone), the future Pope John Paul I. With Lamberto's prodding, Michael makes his first confession in 30 years, tearfully breaking down as he admits to ordering Fredo's murder. Lamberto tells Michael he deserves to suffer for his terrible sins, but that there is hope for his redemption.


title: Michael Corleone

text: John Paul I dies soon after being elected pope, poisoned by Gilday. Michael learns that Altobello (in league with the conspirators) has hired an assassin named Mosca (Mario Donatone) to kill him. Mosca murders Tommasino, and Michael vows before his old friend's casket to sin no more. Vincent reports that Lucchesi, working with Altobello, is behind the assassination attempts on Michael.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Weary of the bloody, lonely life of a Don, Michael retires, making Vincent his successor, but not before giving him permission to retaliate. In return, Vincent agrees to end his romance with Mary. That night, Michael, reconciled with Kay and Anthony, watches his son's performance in the opera "Cavalleria Rusticana". Meanwhile, Vincent has Lucchesi, Gilday and Keinszig murdered; Lucchesi is stabbed to death in his office by Tommasino's longtime bodyguard, Calò, Gilday is shot to death by Neri on the cathedral stairs and Keinszig is abducted, suffocated and left to hang from a bridge, and Connie murders Altobello with a poisoned cannoli.


title: Michael Corleone

text: After the performance, Mosca shoots Michael, wounding him, and a second bullet hits Mary, killing her. Mary's death breaks Michael's spirit, and he screams in agony over her body. In an epilogue scene set in 1997, an elderly Michael (age 77) lives alone in Don Tommasino's villa. Sitting in the same courtyard where he married Apollonia, he suddenly slumps over in his chair and falls to the ground. In the December 2020 release of "The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone", a recut of the third film, the final scene is re-edited to make Michael's death more indefinite and imply he might have lived even longer into old age in isolation, with many of his family members dead.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael is a secondary character in Puzo's novel "The Sicilian", which takes place during his first exile in Sicily. He learns from Clemenza about the legendary exploits of the novel's main character, Salvatore Guiliano (In the novel, the spelling of Salvatore Giuliano's name was intentionally changed by Puzo to "Guiliano".), and is eager to meet him, but Giuliano is murdered before the meeting can take place.


title: Michael Corleone

text: Michael appears in Mark Winegardner's sequel novels "The Godfather Returns" and "The Godfather's Revenge". In "Godfather Returns", set roughly during the time of "Godfather Part II", Michael battles with a new rival, disgruntled Corleone "capo" Nick Geraci, while attempting to legitimize the family. In "The Godfather's Revenge", set a few years after the second film, he moves to protect his criminal empire against Geraci and the machinations of a powerful political dynasty, while dealing with the collapse of his marriage and his guilt over having Fredo murdered. In the latter novel, he has a relationship with actress Marguerite "Rita" Duvall in the early 1960s, but he ends it upon realizing that he is still in love with Kay.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: A co-production between Studio Ghibli, NHK, and NHK Enterprises, "Earwig and the Witch" had its world premiere on October 18, 2020, at the Lumière Film Festival, before premiering in Japan on television on December 30, 2020, on NHK General TV; it was later released in theatres in Japan by Toho on August 27, 2021. The film received generally negative reviews from critics, who criticised the CG animation and screenplay.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: In 1990s England, a witch leaves her child, Earwig, at St. Morwald's Home for Children. The matron head of the home thinks that the name is unfit for a child and changes it to Erica Wigg. Years later, Earwig is a rambunctious 10-year-old who is very comfortable in an orphanage where everyone does what she wants. She likes living there with her friend Custard and doesn't want to get adopted.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: One day, a strange couple, Bella Yaga and Mandrake, adopt Earwig against her wishes. When they get home, Bella Yaga tells Earwig that she is a witch, and that she only adopted Earwig for "an extra pair of hands" to help around the house. Earwig agrees to help, only if Bella Yaga teaches her magic in return. Earwig prepares ingredients for spells and cleans the workroom. Tired of working, she attempts to get out of the house, only to find that all the exits have been magically sealed by Mandrake. She becomes further frustrated because Bella Yaga never teaches her any magic.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: Earwig begins to listen to tapes from an old band called Earwig and discovers that Bella Yaga's cat familiar Thomas can talk. The two of them enter the workroom at night to create a spell that will make them resistant to magic, becoming immune to Bella Yaga's punishments. They also work on a spell to give Bella Yaga a literal "extra pair of hands" on her body so Earwig would be dismissed from her work.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: The spell is a success and Bella Yaga is furious at her extra pair of hands, and casts magical worms that appear in Earwig's room. Because of Earwig's magical resistance, the worms are harmless; Earwig sends the worms through a hole in the wall, but that angers Mandrake. In the ensuing chaos, Earwig breaks into Mandrake's room and discovers he and Bella Yaga were members of the band.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: Through her new power, Earwig is able to take over the house and have the others do what she wants. She even manages to invite her friend Custard over for Christmas. When he arrives, Earwig's mother, another member of the band, drops in for a surprise visit.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: Directed by Gorō Miyazaki, the film was announced as the first full 3D CG animated film by Studio Ghibli and was scheduled for a television premiere on NHK in late 2020. On June 19, 2020, images from the film were revealed by Miyazaki. Gorō said that his father told him to go with it and Toshio Suzuki encouraged him, but after that he was left on his own and made the anime with young staff and "didn't consult with the old guys at all." He also said that he is the only one at the studio who knows the method of creating CG animation. Satoshi Takebe composed the music for the film. The theme song, "Don't Disturb Me", and ending theme, , are performed by a specially-formed band composed of Sherina Munaf on vocals, Hiroki Kamemoto of Glim Spanky on guitar, Kiyokazu Takano of Mrs. Green Apple on bass, Kavka Shishido on drums, and Takebe on keyboards. The film's original soundtrack album was released on January 6, 2021. The album "Earwig and the Witch Songbook: 13 Lime Avenue", which is credited to the film's fictional band "Earwig", was released on January 26, 2022. In addition to the above musicians (sans Takano), the album also features Glim Spanky vocalist Remi Matsuo and Yoasobi support musician Hikaru Yamamoto.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: The film was scheduled to premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival before the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It instead premiered at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon Metropolis, on October 18, 2020.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: In November 2020, the cast and crew information, along with its plot details and broadcast date were announced. It aired on NHK General TV on December 30, 2020.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: On February 11, 2021, Toho announced that the film was slated to be released theatrically in Japan on April 29, 2021. This version includes some scenes not shown on the TV broadcast version (but already included in releases of the film outside Japan).


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: On April 23, 2021, the film was removed from the release calendar due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was later announced that the new release date would be on August 27, 2021.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc by Pony Canyon on December 1, 2021, making it the first Studio Ghibli movie since the original VHS release of "Whisper of the Heart" not to have Walt Disney Japan as home video distributor. However, Walt Disney Japan released the film (under license from Pony Canyon) as part of a box set on the same day which contains the non–Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata Studio Ghibli feature films.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: On July 7, 2020, Studio Ghibli's North American distributor GKIDS announced they had acquired the North American distribution rights to the film and that the film would be set for a theatrical release date of early 2021 in North America.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: On January 7, 2021, GKIDS announced that the film would receive a limited theatrical release beginning on February 3, while it would be added to HBO Max on February 5. The film was released digitally on March 23, 2021, and on Blu-ray Disc and DVD on April 6, 2021. The GKIDS release of the film is the same as the Japanese theatrical version.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: On September 11, 2020, Wild Bunch confirmed they had purchased the distribution rights to Studio Ghibli's films in France from previous distributor Disney, and that they would handle distribution of the film both theatrically and on home media in the country.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: On December 3, 2020, it was announced that Elysian Film Group had acquired the British and Irish distribution rights to the film, becoming the company's very first film acquisition after it was founded in February that year. This will make it the first theatrical release of a Ghibli film since "Princess Mononoke" not to be distributed by StudioCanal UK in the region. Elysian released the film in cinemas on May 28, 2021, on over 100 screens and only dubbed into English, and later released it on DVD and Blu-ray Disc (including the Japanese audio and English subtitles as well as the English dub) on September 27, 2021.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: On October 13, 2021, it was announced that Netflix had acquired the worldwide streaming rights to the film, except Japan and United States. It was released on the service on November 18, 2021.


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 29% of 68 critic reviews are positive for "Earwig and the Witch", and the average rating is . The critics consensus on the website is: "With a story as uninspired as its animation, "Earwig and the Witch" is a surprising—and near-total—misfire for Studio Ghibli." According to Metacritic, which calculated a weighted average score of 46 out of 100 based on 21 reviews, the film received "mixed or average reviews".


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: Writing for "IndieWire", David Ehrlich gave the film a C− and said, "While "Earwig and the Witch" is far from the ugliest film of its kind, there's something uniquely perverse about seeing Ghibli's signature aesthetic suffocated inside a plastic coffin and sapped of its brilliant soul; about seeing the studio's lush green worlds replaced by lifeless backdrops, and its hyper-expressive character designs swapped out for cheap dolls so devoid of human emotion that even the little kids look Botoxed with an inch of their lives. This is the cartoon equivalent of that botched Jesus fresco, only lacking the human touch that gave that debacle some perverse charm of its own."


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: "Vox"s Aja Romano gave the film 3 out of 5 stars and said, "There are some moments early on when there are still shots of nature, or slow Ghibli-esque pans across landscapes. But these isolated shots don't connect to a larger overall mood, characterization, or thematic idea. They feel like pale imitations from a director who knows "what" Ghibli films do, but not "why"… And even the highly striking animation aesthetic for which Ghibli is renowned feels largely absent, due to the muted, flat palette of the film's CGI… Ultimately, "Earwig and the Witch" is a far cry from Studio Ghibli at its finest."


title: Earwig and the Witch

text: As of August 2021, "Earwig and the Witch" grossed $173,704 at the North American box office and $552,333 from other territories, with a worldwide total of $726,037.


title: Aaron Paul filmography

text: Aaron Paul is an American actor. The following are his roles in film, television series and music videos.


title: World war

text: A world war is an international conflict which involves all or most of the world's major powers. Conventionally, the term is reserved for two major international conflicts that occurred during the first half of the 20th century, World WarI (1914–1918) and World WarII (1939–1945), although historians have also described other global conflicts as world wars, such as the Seven Years' War and the Cold War.


title: World war

text: The "Oxford English Dictionary" cited the first known usage in the English language to a Scottish newspaper, "The People's Journal", in 1848: "A war among the great powers is now necessarily a world-war." The term "world war" is used by Karl Marx and his associate, Friedrich Engels, in a series of articles published around 1850 called "The Class Struggles in France". Rasmus B. Anderson in 1889 described an episode in Teutonic mythology as a "world war" (Swedish: "världskrig"), justifying this description by a line in an Old Norse epic poem, "Völuspá: folcvig fyrst I heimi" ("The first great war in the world".) German writer August Wilhelm Otto Niemann had used the term "world war" in the title of his anti-British novel, "Der Weltkrieg: Deutsche Träume" ("The World War: German Dreams") in 1904, published in English as "The Coming Conquest of England".


title: World war

text: The term "first world war" was first used in September 1914 by German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who claimed that "there is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word", citing a wire service report in "The Indianapolis Star" on 20 September 1914. In English, the term "First World War" had been used by Lt-Col. Charles à Court Repington, as a title for his memoirs (published in 1920); he had noted his discussion on the matter with a Major Johnstone of Harvard University in his diary entry of September 10, 1918.


title: World war

text: The term "World War I" was coined by "Time" magazine on page 28b of its June 12, 1939 issue. In the same article, on page 32, the term "World WarII" was first used speculatively to describe the upcoming war. The first use for the actual war came in its issue of September 11, 1939. One week earlier, on September 4, the day after France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, the Danish newspaper "Kristeligt Dagblad" used the term on its front page, saying "The Second World War broke out yesterday at 11 a.m."


title: World war

text: Speculative fiction authors had been noting the concept of a Second World War in 1919 and 1920, when Milo Hastings wrote his dystopian novel, "City of Endless Night".


title: World war

text: Other languages have also adopted the "world war" terminology, for example; in French: "world war" is translated as , in German: (which, prior to the war, had been used in the more abstract meaning of a global conflict), in Italian: , in Spanish and Portuguese: , in Danish and Norwegian: , in Russian: (), and in Finnish: "."


title: World war

text: World War I occurred from 1914 to 1918. In terms of human technological history, the scale of World WarI was enabled by the technological advances of the second industrial revolution and the resulting globalization that allowed global power projection and mass production of military hardware. It had been recognized that the complex system of opposing military alliances (the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires against the British, Russian, and French Empires) was likely, if war broke out, to lead to a worldwide conflict. That caused a very minute conflict between two countries to have the potential to set off a domino effect of alliances, triggering a world war. The fact that the powers involved had large overseas empires virtually guaranteed that such a war would be worldwide, as the colonies' resources would be a crucial strategic factor. The same strategic considerations also ensured that the combatants would strike at each other's colonies, thus spreading the wars far more widely than those of pre-Columbian times.


title: World war

text: War crimes were perpetrated in World War I. Chemical weapons were used in the war despite the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 having outlawed the use of such weapons in warfare. The Ottoman Empire was responsible for the Armenian genocide, during the First World War, as well as other war crimes.


title: World war

text: The Second World War occurred from 1939 to 1945 and is the only conflict in which nuclear weapons have been used; both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the Japanese Empire, were devastated by atomic bombs dropped by the United States. Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, was responsible for genocides, most notably the Holocaust, the killing of about 6,000,000 Jews and 11,000,000 others persecuted by the Nazis, including Romani people and homosexuals. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Canada deported and interned minority groups within their own borders and, largely because of the conflict, many ethnic Germans were later expelled from Eastern Europe. Japan was responsible for attacking neutral nations without a declaration of war, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is also known for its brutal treatment and killing of Allied prisoners of war and the inhabitants of Asia. It also used Asians as forced laborers and was responsible for the Nanking massacre in which 250,000 civilians were brutally murdered by Japanese troops. Noncombatants suffered at least as badly as or worse than combatants, and the distinction between combatants and noncombatants was often blurred by the belligerents of total war in both conflicts.


title: World war

text: The outcome of the war had a profound effect on the course of world history. The old European empires collapsed or were dismantled as a direct result of the wars' crushing costs and, in some cases, their fall was caused by the defeat of imperial powers. The United States became firmly established as the dominant global superpower, along with its ideological foe, the Soviet Union, in close competition. The two superpowers exerted political influence over most of the world's nation-states for decades after the end of the Second World War. The modern international security, economic, and diplomatic system was created in the aftermath of the war.


title: World war

text: Institutions such as the United Nations were established to collectivize international affairs, with the explicit goal of preventing another outbreak of general war. The wars had also greatly changed the course of daily life. Technologies developed during wartime had a profound effect on peacetime life as well, such as by advances in jet aircraft, penicillin, nuclear energy, and electronic computers.


title: World war

text: Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, there has been a widespread and prolonged fear of a potential third World War between nuclear-armed powers. It is often suggested that it would become a nuclear war, and be more devastating and violent than both the First and Second World Wars. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said in 1947 that "I know not with what weapons World WarIII will be fought, but World WarIV will be fought with sticks and stones." It has been anticipated and planned for by military and civil authorities, and it has also been explored in fiction in many countries. Scenarios have ranged from conventional warfare to limited or total nuclear warfare.


title: World war

text: Various former government officials, politicians, authors, and military leaders (including James Woolsey, Alexandre de Marenches, Eliot Cohen, and Subcomandante Marcos) have attempted to apply the labels of the "Third World War" and the "Fourth World War" to various past and present global wars since the end of the Second World War, such as the Cold War and the War on Terror respectively. However, none of the wars have commonly been deemed world wars.


title: World war

text: During the early-21st century, the war in Afghanistan (2001–2021), the Arab Spring (2010–2012), the Syrian civil war (2011–present), the war in Iraq (2013–2017), the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014–present), the Yemeni Civil War (2014–present), the 2022 Kazakh unrest and their worldwide spillovers are sometimes described as proxy wars waged by the United States and Russia, which led some commentators to characterize the situation as a "proto-world war" with many countries embroiled in overlapping conflicts.


title: World war

text: Some historians consider the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) to have been a world war. Historians Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig include it among a list of eight world wars, including the two generally agreed upon world wars plus these six others: the Nine Years' War (1689-1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), the Seven Years' War, the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). British historian John Robert Seeley dubbed all of those wars between France and Great Britain (later the UK) between 1689 and 1815 (including the American Revolutionary War from 1775-1783) as the Second Hundred Years' War, echoing an earlier period of conflict between France and England known as the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453). Although that period included the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–1720) in which France and Great Britain were on the same side. Some writers have referred to the American Revolutionary War alone as a world war.


title: World war

text: Other possible example is the Second Congo War (1998–2003) that involved nine nations and led to ongoing low-intensity warfare despite an official peace and the first democratic elections in 2006. It has frequently been referred to as "Africa's World War", even though it was only waged on one continent.


title: Pragmatism

text: Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.


title: Pragmatism

text: Pragmatism began in the United States in the 1870s. Its origins are often attributed to the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. In 1878, Peirce described it in his pragmatic maxim: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object."


title: Pragmatism

text: Pragmatism as a philosophical movement began in the United States around 1870. Charles Sanders Peirce (and his pragmatic maxim) is given credit for its development,


title: Pragmatism

text: along with later 20th-century contributors, William James and John Dewey. Its direction was determined by The Metaphysical Club members Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Chauncey Wright as well as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.


title: Pragmatism

text: The first use in print of the name "pragmatism" was in 1898 by James, who credited Peirce with coining the term during the early 1870s. James regarded Peirce's "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series (including "" (1877), and especially "" (1878)) as the foundation of pragmatism. Peirce in turn wrote in 1906 that Nicholas St. John Green had been instrumental by emphasizing the importance of applying Alexander Bain's definition of belief, which was "that upon which a man is prepared to act". Peirce wrote that "from this definition, pragmatism is scarce more than a corollary; so that I am disposed to think of him as the grandfather of pragmatism". John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation."


title: Pragmatism

text: Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt, and said that, in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object", which he later called the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to the general extent of the conceivable implications for informed practice of that object's effects. This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a founder of statistics.


title: Pragmatism

text: Peirce lectured and further wrote on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation. While framing a conception's meaning in terms of conceivable tests, Peirce emphasized that, since a conception is general, its meaning, its intellectual purport, equates to its acceptance's implications for general practice, rather than to any definite set of real effects (or test results); a conception's clarified meaning points toward its conceivable verifications, but the outcomes are not meanings, but individual upshots. Peirce in 1905 coined the new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition", saying that "all went happily" with James's and F. C. S. Schiller's variant uses of the old name "pragmatism" and that he nonetheless coined the new name because of the old name's growing use in "literary journals, where it gets abused". Yet in a 1906 manuscript, he cited as causes his differences with James and Schiller. and, in a 1908 publication, his differences with James as well as literary author Giovanni Papini. Peirce in any case regarded his views that truth is immutable and infinity is real, as being opposed by the other pragmatists, but he remained allied with them on other issues.


title: Pragmatism

text: Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a brand of pragmatism known sometimes as neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty, the most influential of the late 20th century pragmatists along with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom. Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and a "neo-classical" pragmatism (such as Susan Haack) that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey.


title: Pragmatism

text: A few of the various but often interrelated positions characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include:


title: Pragmatism

text: Dewey in "The Quest for Certainty" criticized what he called "the philosophical fallacy": Philosophers often take categories (such as the mental and the physical) for granted because they don't realize that these are nominal concepts that were invented to help solve specific problems. This causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are the "ultimate Being" of Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a "realm of value", the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction from concrete thought, has nothing to do with the action of concrete thinking.


title: Pragmatism

text: David L. Hildebrand summarized the problem: "Perceptual inattention to the specific functions comprising inquiry led realists and idealists alike to formulate accounts of knowledge that project the products of extensive abstraction back onto experience."


title: Pragmatism

text: From the outset, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with the scientific method as they understood it. They argued that idealist and realist philosophy had a tendency to present human knowledge as something beyond what science could grasp. They held that these philosophies then resorted either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to correspondence theories of knowledge and truth. Pragmatists criticized the former for its a priorism, and the latter because it takes correspondence as an unanalyzable fact. Pragmatism instead tries to explain the relation between knower and known.


title: Pragmatism

text: In 1868, C.S. Peirce argued that there is no power of intuition in the sense of a cognition unconditioned by inference, and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that awareness of an internal world is by hypothetical inference from external facts. Introspection and intuition were staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always be analyzed into finer cognitive stages. That which we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind—the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around. At the same time he held persistently that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from principles of psychology understood as a special science: what we do think is too different from what we should think; in his "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" series, Peirce formulated both pragmatism and principles of statistics as aspects of scientific method in general. This is an important point of disagreement with most other pragmatists, who advocate a more thorough naturalism and psychologism.


title: Pragmatism

text: Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" in which he criticized attempts by many philosophers of science to carve out a space for epistemology that is entirely unrelated to—and sometimes thought of as superior to—the empirical sciences. W.V. Quine, instrumental in bringing naturalized epistemology back into favor with his essay "Epistemology Naturalized", also criticized "traditional" epistemology and its "Cartesian dream" of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was impossible in practice as well as misguided in theory, because it separates epistemology from scientific inquiry.


title: Pragmatism

text: Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of anti-skepticism and fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, with no ability to take a "God's-eye-view", this does not necessitate a globalized skeptical attitude, a radical philosophical skepticism (as distinguished from that which is called scientific skepticism). Peirce insisted that (1) in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope, that truth and the real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later but still inevitably, by investigation taken far enough, and (2) contrary to Descartes's famous and influential methodology in the "Meditations on First Philosophy", doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal fiat to motivate fruitful inquiry, and much less can philosophy begin in universal doubt. Doubt, like belief, requires justification. Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in the sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (which Dewey called a "situation"), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter. Note that anti-skepticism is a reaction to modern academic skepticism in the wake of Descartes. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is quite congenial to the older skeptical tradition.


title: Pragmatism

text: Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism as what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is true. Here knowledge and action are portrayed as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any sort of inquiry organisms used to cope with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: inquiry is how organisms can get a grip on their environment. "Real" and "true" are functional labels in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of this context. It is not "realist" in a traditionally robust sense of realism (what Hilary Putnam later called metaphysical realism), but it is realist in how it acknowledges an external world which must be dealt with.


title: Pragmatism

text: Many of James' best-turned phrases—"truth's cash value" and "the true is only the expedient in our way of thinking" —were taken out of context and caricatured in contemporary literature as representing the view where any idea with practical utility is true. William James wrote:


title: Pragmatism

text: The role of belief in representing reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is a belief valid when it represents reality? "Copying is one (and only one) genuine mode of knowing". Are beliefs dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful they prove in inquiry and in action? Is it only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that beliefs acquire meaning? Does a belief only become true when it succeeds in this struggle? In James's pragmatism nothing practical or useful is held to be necessarily true nor is anything which helps to survive merely in the short term. For example, to believe my cheating spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it is certainly not useful from a more long-term perspective because it doesn't accord with the facts (and is therefore not true).


title: Pragmatism

text: While pragmatism started simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become a full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging implications for the entire philosophical field. Pragmatists who work in these fields share a common inspiration, but their work is diverse and there are no received views.


title: Pragmatism

text: In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments and progress in science cannot be couched in terms of concepts and theories somehow mirroring reality. Instrumentalist philosophers often define scientific progress as nothing more than an improvement in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism does not state that truth does not matter, but rather provides a specific answer to the question of what truth and falsity mean and how they function in science.


title: Pragmatism

text: One of C. I. Lewis' main arguments in "Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge" (1929) was that science does not merely provide a copy of reality but must work with conceptual systems and that those are chosen for pragmatic reasons, that is, because they aid inquiry. Lewis' own development of multiple modal logics is a case in point. Lewis is sometimes called a proponent of conceptual pragmatism because of this.


title: Pragmatism

text: Another development is the cooperation of logical positivism and pragmatism in the works of Charles W. Morris and Rudolf Carnap. The influence of pragmatism on these writers is mostly limited to the incorporation of the pragmatic maxim into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of the movement do not often refer to them.


title: Pragmatism

text: W. V. Quine's paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", published in 1951, is one of the more celebrated papers of 20th-century philosophy in the analytic tradition. The paper is an attack on two central tenets of the logical positivists' philosophy. One is the distinction between analytic statements (tautologies and contradictions) whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of the meanings of the words in the statement ('all bachelors are unmarried'), and synthetic statements, whose truth (or falsehood) is a function of (contingent) states of affairs. The other is reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms which refers exclusively to immediate experience. Quine's argument brings to mind Peirce's insistence that axioms are not a priori truths but synthetic statements.


title: Pragmatism

text: Later in his life Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook, "Formal Logic". By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the nearest of any of the classical pragmatists to an ordinary language philosophy. Schiller sought to undermine the very possibility of formal logic, by showing that words only had meaning when used in context. The least famous of Schiller's main works was the constructive sequel to his destructive book "Formal Logic". In this sequel, "Logic for Use", Schiller attempted to construct a new logic to replace the formal logic that he had criticized in "Formal Logic". What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method.


title: Pragmatism

text: Whereas Schiller dismissed the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate validity and see logic as one logical tool among others—or perhaps, considering the multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. This is the view of C. I. Lewis. C. S. Peirce developed multiple methods for doing formal logic.


title: Pragmatism

text: Stephen Toulmin's "The Uses of Argument" inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies (although it is an epistemological work).


title: Pragmatism

text: James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: experience is the ultimate test and experience is what needs to be explained. They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because, in the tradition dating from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism: we should try to explain all that is given in experience including connections and meaning, instead of explaining them away and positing sense data as the ultimate reality. Radical empiricism, or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey's words, wants to give a place to meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms.


title: Pragmatism

text: F. C. S. Schiller's first book "Riddles of the Sphinx" was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatist movement taking place in America. In it, Schiller argues for a middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism. Schiller contends on the one hand that mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world. These include free will, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would add God. On the other hand, abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world (e.g. the imperfect, change, physicality). While Schiller is vague about the exact sort of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only insofar as it does help in explanation.


title: Pragmatism

text: In the second half of the 20th century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there is no point in asking what "ultimate reality" consists of. More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the postanalytic philosopher Daniel Dennett, who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to acknowledge both the "syntactical" aspects of reality (i.e., whizzing atoms) and its emergent or "semantic" properties (i.e., meaning and value).


title: Pragmatism

text: Radical empiricism gives answers to questions about the limits of science, the nature of meaning and value and the workability of reductionism. These questions feature prominently in current debates about the relationship between religion and science, where it is often assumed—most pragmatists would disagree—that science degrades everything that is meaningful into "merely" physical phenomena.


title: Pragmatism

text: Both John Dewey in "Experience and Nature" (1929) and, half a century later, Richard Rorty in his "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979) argued that much of the debate about the relation of the mind to the body results from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that there is no need to posit the mind or mindstuff as an ontological category.


title: Pragmatism

text: Pragmatists disagree over whether philosophers ought to adopt a quietist or a naturalist stance toward the mind-body problem. The former, including Rorty, want to do away with the problem because they believe it's a pseudo-problem, whereas the latter believe that it is a meaningful empirical question.


title: Pragmatism

text: Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Pragmatist ethics is broadly humanist because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us as humans. Good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz. the good reasons approach. The pragmatist formulation pre-dates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values and facts such as Jerome Schneewind and John Searle.


title: Pragmatism

text: William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay "The Will to Believe" has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves a certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof when making moral decisions.


title: Pragmatism

text: Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy. In his classic article "Three Independent Factors in Morals", he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: the right, the virtuous and the good. He held that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions, the possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot always be easily solved.


title: Pragmatism

text: Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends which he saw as responsible for the degradation of our everyday working lives and education, both conceived as merely a means to an end. He stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself.


title: Pragmatism

text: Dewey was opposed to other ethical philosophies of his time, notably the emotivism of Alfred Ayer. Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and thought values could best be characterized not as feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he termed "consummatory experience". An additional implication of this view is that ethics is a fallible undertaking because human beings are frequently unable to know what would satisfy them.


title: Pragmatism

text: During the late 1900s and first decade of 2000, pragmatism was embraced by many in the field of bioethics led by the philosophers John Lachs and his student Glenn McGee, whose 1997 book "The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering" (see designer baby) garnered praise from within classical American philosophy and criticism from bioethics for its development of a theory of pragmatic bioethics and its rejection of the principalism theory then in vogue in medical ethics. An anthology published by the MIT Press titled "Pragmatic Bioethics" included the responses of philosophers to that debate, including Micah Hester, Griffin Trotter and others many of whom developed their own theories based on the work of Dewey, Peirce, Royce and others. Lachs developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics independent of but extending from the work of Dewey and James.


title: Pragmatism

text: A recent pragmatist contribution to meta-ethics is Todd Lekan's "Making Morality". Lekan argues that morality is a fallible but rational practice and that it has traditionally been misconceived as based on theory or principles. Instead, he argues, theory and rules arise as tools to make practice more intelligent.


title: Pragmatism

text: John Dewey's "Art as Experience", based on the William James lectures he delivered at Harvard University, was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday experience ("IEP"). Art, for Dewey, is or should be a part of everyone's creative lives and not just the privilege of a select group of artists. He also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient. Dewey's treatment of art was a move away from the transcendental approach to aesthetics in the wake of Immanuel Kant who emphasized the unique character of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation. A notable contemporary pragmatist aesthetician is Joseph Margolis. He defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity", a human "utterance" that isn't an ontological quirk but in line with other human activity and culture in general. He emphasizes that works of art are complex and difficult to fathom, and that no determinate interpretation can be given.


title: Pragmatism

text: Both Dewey and James investigated the role that religion can still play in contemporary society, the former in "A Common Faith" and the latter in "The Varieties of Religious Experience".


title: Pragmatism

text: From a general point of view, for William James, something is true only insofar as it works. Thus, the statement, for example, that prayer is heard may work on a psychological level but (a) may not help to bring about the things you pray for (b) may be better explained by referring to its soothing effect than by claiming prayers are heard. As such, pragmatism is not antithetical to religion but it is not an apologetic for faith either. James' metaphysical position however, leaves open the possibility that the ontological claims of religions may be true. As he observed in the end of the Varieties, his position does not amount to a denial of the existence of transcendent realities. Quite the contrary, he argued for the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such realities, since such beliefs do make a difference in an individual's life and refer to claims that cannot be verified or falsified either on intellectual or common sensorial grounds.