Word: deterministic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reader wonder why the old man should have been prevented for so long from rattling his dead bones. Today Mark Twain's often irreverent notions about God, Bible and his fellow men seem no more fearsome than a day in a college classroom. By the lights of modern determinist psychology, for instance, there is scarcely anything startling in this statement: "Sometimes a man is ... a born scoundrel-like Stanford White*-and upon him the world lavishes censure and dispraise; but he is only obeying the law of his nature. [The human race] did not invent itself...
...slave labor camps, the Katyn massacre, the mass deportations should have been enough). Says Aron: "Both American liberals and the Left in France and Britain share the same illusion: the illusion of the orientation of history in a constant direction . . . Marxism is only one version, a simultaneously cataclysmic and determinist version, of an optimism to which rationalists are professionally inclined...
...help Steve to reforge his faith in business and himself. Author Swiggett understands the paternalistic embrace in which the large, modern corporation holds its employees-but he vastly exaggerates it. His notion that the corporation makes or unmakes the man is on a par with all the determinist devil theories of history which hold that every evil of human life flows from the capitalistic "system," or from the machine, or from sunspots...
...History was always goose-stepping its way through the centuries in Spengler's vision. Compared with his German mentor France's Amaury de Riencourt, 38, a freelance writer and lecturer who now lives in the U.S., is more amiable, less apocalyptic. Compared either with Spengler or other determinist philosophers of history- Toynbee, Pareto, Marx-Author de Riencourt works on an intellectual shoestring...
Essentially, Russell's Utopia is a strongly determinist Garden of Eden where knowledge is virtue and no one has enough free will to choose to do evil. Russell is not unaware of the serpents of danger in the world, but he offers to charm them with never-never tunes that have become more conventional than convincing: 1) world government; 2) world prosperity 3) worldwide birth control; 4) more individual initiative and decentralization of economic and political power...