Word: aristotelian
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Human beings, by nature, are a skeptical bunch. Fads and le dernier cri (the trendy French for "the latest trends," ironically) aside, we are often hesitant to accept concepts which are new and alien, especially when it comes to technology. Consider the group of Aristotelian professors who made the following pronouncement to Galileo after he claimed to have discovered Jupiter's moons using a telescope: "[They] are invisible to the naked eye and therefore do not exist." Or the snappish response of Warner Brothers' founder H. M. Warner, who retorted in a 1927 interview, "Who the hell wants to hear...
...least, the But-the-Good-Times-Were-Not-Meant- to-Last genre relies on stars' generous willingness to drink, go bankrupt and have their houses burned down in order to create hypnotic TV. Behind the Music delivers on the credits' promise of "Fame...Passion... Heartbreak...Success...Glory" with an Aristotelian three-act structure--rise, fall and rehab--and florid narration: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers "came out of the South--driven by jangling guitars and led by a rock-'n'-roll rebel!" E!'s True Hollywood Story is tart and eager to dish dirt. Compare an Intimate Portrait on Natalie...
...deliberate attempt at experimentation, or sheer incompetence--it undermines the drama and terror essential to the play. By subverting Macbeth's atmosphere of tragedy, Colapinto's performance ultimately prevents the production from generating the fear and explosive emotion which the play is intended to evovoke. To take the Aristotelian approach, it denies us the catharsis of tragedy. To use layman's terms, it's boring, frustrating and confusing. Either way, a Macbeth played straight seems as if it would have been the better choice; at Saturday's production, Colapinto may have been enjoying a joke, but the audience didn...
Having decided on a fuzzy, age-based rating system similar to the one used by movies, the networks are having their flacks write op-ed pieces that extol the Aristotelian virtues of vagueness. In a similar position, the tobacco industry would favor a cigarette-pack warning label that says, "Some people sort of think that cigarette smoking may not be the absolutely best thing you can do for your health, although some others may disagree...
Quite apart from my naive affection for Aristotelian ethics (shared with such other insufficiently Protestant men as Melanchton and Beza), I confess that in my former confusion, I had been somewhat struck by the theological ethics of Calvin and his successors; in that darkened state, I had been impressed more than I ought by more recent Protestant efforts to ground sexual ethics in the fact of the divine creation of the human race as male and female...