Word: moderns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Greeks conceived the idea of the atom, and over the centuries it made the nature of matter seem a nice, simple thing. Modern physicists opened the nucleus of the atom, and the whirligig inside opened up a new and wonderful world. But man continues attempts to explain the universe as the harmony envisioned by the Greeks. Einstein thought he could, but never found a way to put his unified field theory to a test. Last week two new and impressive efforts toward harmony were announced in Manhattan and West Berlin. See SCIENCE, "Assumptions of Symmetry...
Pound's emphasis on principle marks something of a revolution in U.S. thought about the law. For many decades powerful opinion held that the law stemmed not from fundamental, rational principles but rather from the needs of the day. In the complexities of modern life it became fashionable to hold that principles are as changeable as those needs. The U.S. lawyer who best symbolized this view was Oliver Wendell Holmes-the Magnificent Yankee. No one had a greater love of the law than Holmes, who sat on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. Although often in the minority...
Riesman, formerly a lawyer, is the author of The Lonely Crowd, Individualism Reconsidered, Faces in the Crowd. and Medicine in Modern Society...
Bertrand Russell stands at the end of a philosophic line of succession extending from John Locke through David Hume and John Stuart Mill. As such, he is heir to perhaps the most civilized and intelligent tradition in the modern Western world. Like the giants before him, he is distinguished for his analytical brilliance, lucid literary style, sane empiricism, humanistic ethics, courageously enlightened life, and like them, except for Locke, he is a religious agnostic. He is indeed a magnificent fusion of passion and skepticism...
...other development found some of its earliest modern representatives in the German romantic philosophers, who sought to preserve the validity of various dogmas by taking them symbolically--seeing them as poetic anticipations of their own profound ontological discoveries. Thus Hegel explained the Trinity as a figurative approximation to his everlasting metaphysical waltz-step of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and Professor Tillich finds the doctrine of the Incarnation still viable because it expresses "the principle of the divine self-manifestation in the ground of being itself ... the dynamic spiritual word which mediates between the silent mystery of the abyss of being...