Word: cartesians
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Against this assumption, Adler poses a contemporary version of the "Cartesian challenge." Show me an animal or a machine that can speak in sentences, said Descartes, in effect, and I will believe that man is not unique in his possession of an immaterial power that gives him reason. Even idiots can arrange words to make known their thoughts, Descartes explained, but "no animal can do the same." To him that was satisfactory proof that "the brutes" have no reason at all. Adler demands more before he will abandon man's uniqueness. Show me a neurologist who can "give...
...French insisted that they were not guilty, arguing with excellent Cartesian logic that it was not, after all, in the interest of French exporters for Britain to devalue and thus be able to compete better against French products. It may be, of course, that the French miscalculated, hoping for a crisis that did not go as far as devaluation. In any event, De Gaulle's emissaries in Brussels this week made it clear that the devaluation certainly had not brought Britain any closer to Common Market membership...
...also does a good deal more than talk. His actions, like his speeches, are based on a philosophy of political and economic realism that he unabashedly calls "Bourguibism." Bourguibism is shaped by the belief, he explains in the Cartesian style that he acquired in elite French schools, that "no domain of terrestrial life must escape man's power of reason." Ever since the French left him to rule Tunisia in 1956, Bourguiba has been trying to apply reason to nation building. He has not always succeeded, but there are increasing signs of more success than failure...
...portrait of 1650. With an intimation of the coming romantic age, he cloaks himself in an academic gown, accouters himself with a book, and poses against pictures whose gilt edges focus attention especially on his eyes. It is clearly the portrait of the artist as rational philosopher, saying with Cartesian clarity: I perceive, therefore I paint...
...scenery is either fossilized, the bare gnarled tree of Waiting For Godot, or funereal, the ashcans of Endgame, the urns of Play, the mound of earth in Happy Days.'Man is maimed and buried alive in these props. One critic has called a Beckett hero a perverse Cartesian: I stink, therefore I am. Actually, the degradation and mutilation of the body are Beckett's image for the withering away of the soul...