Word: notionalism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...course, nonexistent. We feel no empathy for embryos in this context and see no need to assign to them any conception of death or dying. Yet, in a parallel context, such as if a rape victim is given a drug to prevent embryo implantation, people suddenly introduce the notion of “killing” a child. What causes this leap of logic...
Like all nuclear-weaponsprograms, North Korea's should be a concern for everyone. The notion of who is an outlaw and who occupies the moral high ground on enforcing nuclear nonproliferation isn't as clear to me as your article makes out. I suspect that the U.S.'s current work on tactical nuclear weapons and our unwillingness to reduce our inventory of warheads are in violation of the NPT--making the U.S. an outlaw. If we're including violent tendencies in an analysis of risk, the U.S. is the only nuclear power to have used those weapons on human...
James Poniewozik's essay"Postapocalypse Now" [Oct. 23] was an interesting look at pop culture's fixation on doomsday fantasies, but what we should take from the current visions of mass destruction is not the notion that we're getting too comfortable with Armageddon but the realization that fears of Armageddon have always been with us. Our time is little different from all the eras in which people believed the end of the world was imminent. Yet here we are in a world that somehow has not come to an end, resurrecting ancient symbols to describe our modern doomsday...
Stranger Than Fiction has a surer aim at getting through the brain to the heart. Zack Helm's script imagines a decent, solitary fellow named Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), then springs the notion that he may well be a fiction--a character in a work in progress by reclusive novelist Karen (Kay) Eiffel (Emma Thompson). And when Kay figures out how to kill off the character, Harold will...
TIME: Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science...