Thursday, October 26, 2006

Definition of filiopietism

The best one I could find anyway, without making it my life's work.*
An appeal to tradition is also a form of an appeal to authority, because tradition is treated as being "authoritative" in some matter. As in the above example, it is not uncommon for an appeal to tradition to also be explicitly linked to an appeal to numbers, although every appeal to tradition does this at least implicitly.

Also Known As: filiopietism

My emphasis.

Source.

*I found the word in a review of The Church and the Market : A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, by Thomas E. Woods Jr. [The Mises Store is having a sale this weekend for those of us who have bought from them before. (There's a special code to enter to get the discount). This isn't one of the ones on sale, but I had to check out the title and I've written about Woods before. No, come to think of it, that was Chafuen's book.]

It was a bit of a challenge to find a definition of the word. My massive Webster's Unabridged didn't have it, nor did a Google search turn it up quickly, yet there were hundreds of uses of it on the web. I titled this post as I did to make it easier for the next guy to find it.

Notice that even this definition is inverted: the term is an afterthought. Odd that I should find it in About.com's section on "Agnosticism/Atheism". I suppose, if you break it down the parts mean something like "the devotion of a son for his father." I'd like to know who coined it.

1 comment:

Matt McKinley said...

I just want to thank you for making this simple to find. Without question, this is a tough one to find. I have noticed that those who use the word, often do so in an effort to be obscure in saying, "Blindly following/supporting" something or someone.