Word: koestler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...flawed drama Caligula and began intensive work on The Plague, an allegory of moral infection and individual salvation. By the age of 35 he was a candidate for the Nobel; when he was 40 Camus found that his work, along with George Orwell's and Arthur Koestler's, was one of the rallying points for Europe's non-Communist left. His loathing for totalitarianism brought him into sharp conflict with Sartre, then in lockstep with the Stalinist party line. Much was made of Camus's ambiguous feelings about Algeria: the anti-imperialist could neither condone terrorism...
Your story on France's New Philosophers [Sept. 12] should have been titled "The Noble Savage Rides Again." France's young philosophers may have read Arthur Koestler, but they have certainly studied Karl Popper. Their philosophies, as described in your article, sound like Pop parodies of selected chapters from Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (first published in 1945), plus a generous admixture of disconcertingly old-fashioned Weltschmerz...
Since Arthur Koestler writes that most American and European Jews trace their origins to the non-Semitic Khazars [Aug. 23], whom should the anti-Semites hate now? The Arabs...
Stamped Kosher. Given the complex genetic blending that has occurred during Europe's history, Koestler's position is all too facile, despite the obvious effort and time the author spent on his study. It is not that he is unaware of the subtle traps and deadfalls of racial theory. In fact, he does his usual imitation of a Renaissance man by including mathematical formulas derived from a biochemical blood index. But Koestler's enthusiasm for the idea of a non-Semitic Jewry threatens to drown his own carefully drawn qualifications...
This conflict between sense and sensationalism causes some problems. Koestler is fearful, for example, that his book might be used to undercut the foundations of Israel. If most Israelis are really descended from Caucasian nomads who stamped themselves kosher 1,200 years ago, how can they claim...