Word: aristotelian
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...universe began in a single, flashing act of creation; the divine intellect willed all into being, ex nihilo. It is not surprising that scientists have generally stayed clear of the question of ultimate authorship, of the final "uncaused cause." In years past, in fact, they held to the Aristotelian idea of a universe that was "ungenerated and indestructible," with an infinite past and an infinite future. This was known as the Steady State theory...
...perhaps Tom McGuane also suffers from memory loss--he has forgotten the Aristotelian Florida of 92 in the Shade, forsaken it for the Caribbean syndicalism of Panama. As Geoffrey Wolfe (one of our better book critics) pointed out in his review in New Times, this book suffers from many things, but most of all it suffers from the first person. But that first person telling also makes me think there is more to Panama than one might first notice: 92 in the Shade was a story of heat, moving at a seemingly languid pace, while Panama, underneath the cool cocaine...
...sense, his critics were right, for Adler still describes himself as an Aristotelian. (When he first started his Aspen programs for executives, Adler and a group actually donned robes to get into the spirit of academe.) He relishes dismissing most of philosophy since Thomas Aquinas as being snarled with pseudo problems. Modern philosophy, claims Adler, got off to "a very bad start" when Descartes and Locke committed the "besetting sin of modern thought": they ignored Aristotle...
...solar system. But Aristotle's thinking continued to dominate astronomy until 1572, when Tycho Brahe observed a bright new star (which scientists now know was a supernova, or exploding star) near the constellation Cassiopeia. Beyond any doubt, it had not previously been visible. Other blows to Aristotelian cosmology followed swiftly. By early in the 17th century, Galileo had used his telescope to discover spots on the sun−demonstrating that the solar complexion was somewhat less than perfect−and to prove that the sky was filled with stars that could not be seen with the naked...
Pinter people tend to live ineffably in the present and represent nothing out side themselves. Events have no proximate causes, let alone final Aristotelian ones. But in his last play, Old Times, Pinter's characters began to be defined by their uncertain memory of the past. Now the particulars of the present are beginning to be bounded by the dark inevitability of the future, the no man's land of death in life. The new and more abstract world that Britain's leading playwright has begun to explore at 44 is still imperfectly mapped, and he will...