Word: hook
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...when brisk, jet-borne academic types whisk in and out of Washington, the legendary absent-minded professor is an anachronism. But New York University Philosopher Sidney Hook still conforms to that older, homelier image; he has been known to enter the shower wearing pajamas, and he once absently rejected the Oedipus Complex as a tool of philosophy by exclaiming: "I learned that stuff at my mother's knee...
...several other ways, Hook is oldfashioned. Unlike the predominant neo-positivists, who believe that philosophy is only semantics and that ethical judgments are merely emotional expressions like "Yipee!", Hook still believes in philosophy as a meaningful guide to human actions. On the other hand, he also stands apart from the recent upsurge of Christian existentialism propounded by Jaspers and Tillich. In short, amidst changing philosophical fashions, he has remained steadfast to the credo he learned, not at his mother's knee, but from his spiritual father, John Dewey-a rational humanist whose roots reach back to Enlightenment...
...Hook is probably best known to the layman through his writings on public affairs, in which his position is similarly steadfast and similarly directed against what he regards as the extremes: for more than a decade, he has championed liberal anti-Communism against both the political left and right. In his latest collection of essays, he turns from politics back to philosophy, offering finely reasoned argument coupled with a lucid style and humane tolerance. A great many readers will violently disagree with his Dewey-eyed "pragmatic naturalism," his belief that the scientific method is readily applicable to moral problems. Some...
Wrong but Right. Man's existential loneliness, says Hook, cannot be comforted by either resignation or faith, but by courageously facing the facts of his existence. "In the best of societies," he says, "death may be conquered, but not tragedy." Like Dewey, Hook disdains the jargonauts among his colleagues, insists that questions and answers must merely meet the test of common sense. He exhaustively argues, for instance, that the metaphysical term "Being" is, in Dewey's phrase, a "zero word." The term, Hook says, "merely enables those who write obscurely and feel inchoate to imagine that they...
...that Hook has any use for such traditional faith. He regards all varieties of organized religion as philosophically unsound and politically dangerous. To him, religious doctrines "constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability" when tested on the scale of logic. Even if a naturalist woke up in the presence of God, and were thus proven wrong, says Hook, the theory he held while on earth would still have been more reasonable than the supernaturalist who is "unreasonable, even if it turns out he is right...