Word: humanists
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Edman's own philosophy is a humanist cocktail whose chief ingredients are Plato, Santayana and Manhattan. It is the last component that shines, like a pickled cherry, out of Philosopher's Holiday, a tall, watery glassful of reminiscences, anecdotes and essays devoted to "persons and places, many of them obscure, about which I have occasionally told my friends over a glass of sherry. . . ." Son of a shirt & blouse manufacturer, Philosopher Edman still lives in the neighborhood where he was born and brought up, a stone's throw from Columbia University. He has "spent a long life...
...about. "I have written one word," he announces, "God." Altogether he intends to write three. The second will be "Is." The third: "Love." The announcement of this program makes dawning sense, for if Saroyan appears in his stories in any consistent role, it is as a sort of humanist jumping jack, waiting only until he has written a few more Books of Saroyan to leap forward as a U. S. prophet...
More aggressive, wittier and compact is 42-year-old Lancelot Hogben (Mathematics for the Million), an English biologist who calls himself a "scientific humanist" and is a kind of English version of iconoclastic Thorstein Veblen. Writers and statesmen he attacks for their ignorance of science, scientists for their ignorance of social matters. In addition he attacks Marxists, liberals, classical scholarship, "sentimental internationalists," theology, economists, and educators who permit children to study what they like rather than what is good for them (science). On the constructive side, he advocates biotechnology as a way to make nations self-sufficient, thermodynamics...
Instead I heard a humanist, the best...
...emotional Manhattan theorizer who has successively been a Baptist, Unitarian and Universalist preacher, and now is a New Humanist, an Extra-Sensory Perceptionist* and Euthanatist Charles Francis Potter, Dr. Tuttle's murder and attempted suicide were reasonable. He and a sizable group of other notable men believe so strongly in the right of an incurably diseased individual to have his life terminated gently that they have organized a National Society for the Legalization of Euthanasia. For purposes of their propaganda the Miami incident came in handy, occurring as it did the very day after Dr. Potter first publicly announced...