Word: cartesians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...contended that man could demonstrate truth only about a world he could measure. The world of spirit was beyond such measurement, a matter of faith and intuition, not truth. Descartes became a self-fulfilling prophet. The spiritual world was left to philosophers and divines, many of whom shared the Cartesian bias that theirs was an ephemeral discipline. The physical world became the domain of Western science, though man sometimes seemed less the master of that world than its mechanic...
Vilfredo Pareto, a 19th century economist, had a theory: if A equals a given income, and B equals the number of people in a country with incomes greater than A; and if the logarithms of A and B are plotted on the Cartesian y axis and x axis, respectively, the resulting curve will be inclined by approximately 56°. In other words, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor...
...three or four individual men are picked out of the mass, and only about one is there any real "story," the last man, who as the book enters its final page ceases his searching through the cylinder. The Lost Ones is essentially the exercise of a narrator who is Cartesian in knowing, describing, analyzing--and in the process creating...
...psilocybe mushrooms can guarantee the sorcerer's survival. That depends on his "impeccable will"; and Castaneda's third and finest book, Journey to Ixtlan, describes the forging of that will, as Don Juan-without drugs -communicates the lessons of the warrior's power to his obstinately Cartesian student in the bright burnt mountains and lava gorges of Mexico...
...both a Cartesian and a sensualist, Matisse wasted nothing. Feeling, for him, included a great deal that flat paint could not convey-notably the awareness of thick, monumental volume, of the thrust and jut of shapes by which human frames state their energy. The proper vehicle for this was sculpture, where volume is real and not-as in painting-illusion. The result, despite the small scale that Matisse preferred in works like Reclining Nude III, was the most Michelangelesque collection of sculpture that any 20th century artist has produced...