Word: agee
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...check the operation of a vague generality under fire, take a typical example: "Hume brought empiricism to its logical conclusion." The question is asked, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age he lived in?" Our hero replies by opening his essay with, "David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. It this be the spirit of the age he lived in, then he was representative of it." This generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually he has not the vaguest idea what Hume really said, or what...
...artful equivocation is an almost impossible concept to explain, but it is easy to demonstrate. Let us take our earlier examination question, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent age he lived in?" The equivocator would answer it this way: "Some people believe that David Hume was not necessarily a great philosopher, because his thoughts was merely a reflection of conditions around him colored by his own personality. Others, however, strongly support Hume's greatness on the grounds that his personality definitely affected the age in which he lived. It is not a question of the cart before the horse...
...autumn in the northeastern Pacific," with his calf whale backing into the world tail first-14 feet long, weighing a ton, ready to swim. Nursing for two years on mother's milk, the little leviathan will gain seven pounds a day. Sexual maturity will arrive at the age of nine, but he will not reach full growth until he is 30 to 45. Then he may be as much as 60 feet long and 60 tons in weight. He will be able to cruise at six knots; in a panic he can do 20. When he is hungry...
Zoology's general rule is that no animal dies of old age. But the whale may come as close as any. For the whale has no "natural" enemies, in the sense of larger animals that habitually feed on him. Only when young or when attacked by his own kind does he need to flee. Though scarred by the sucking disks of the octopus, bitten by the squid, carrying the buried bills of swordfish, a few of this year's crop of calf whales may survive to be 75. But most of those that escape the whalers' harpoons...
...were relieved to get back to school where at least some of the people over thirty weren't really over thirty (it's only incidentally related to age) and most of the others were far too occupied writing treatises on the differences between Ramist and Aristotelian logic to bait you. Except, of course, for an occasional mini-confrontation with an interested, bespeckled administrator who wanted to know why you had to paint that fence and why you thought your boredom was more profound than that of an eight-year-old who got tired of the same old toys (you never...