Word: paradoxical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Whatever our motives, American society presents few barriers today to a professional seeking change. An oboist can become a lawyer, an accountant an agent, a lawyer a baker--and that may be the problem, says Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice. "There's a restless dissatisfaction that comes from always wondering if there's something better out there," he says. Indeed, more than half of global executives wish they could start over in a different career, according to a survey by search firm Korn/Ferry International. "People define their work...
...political parties or groups of people; this is a legitimate sentiment, but too often the result is a muted or nonexistent reaction to sexism when it manifests itself on campus, because women feel no common bond of gender. As Cott puts it, “There is a paradox between recognizing the problem of women as a constructed group in society, and then the individualistic aims that the group wishes to accomplish.” The best way to resolve the paradox is not to deny the first condition, which only creates a weak foundation at best for the second?...
...There is this paradox that terror is always a concession of impotence and insecurity and illegitimacy, and Stalin's rule had that. And with terror comes boredom, in the oddest way. Mohamed Atta brought boredom to us too. It's not just airport queues, with some humorless airport official frisking your 6-year-old daughter. It's the confrontation with the dependent mind. There's no argument possible. We share no points of discourse. It's like being with any fanatical Christian, for instance. The higher faculties just close down, because there's nothing for them to do. So there...
...here is the paradox of decoupling. On the one hand, Islamist terrorism has imposed a huge transaction tax on the global economy; just try to put a price tag on millions of hours wasted by passengers waiting at security, on container and cargo controls, on cumbersome border checks, on the expansion of police and intelligence personnel - not to speak of the nonmonetary costs of civil liberties curtailed. On the other hand, globalization just gallops along. "We told you so," hard-core practitioners of the dismal science might crow. "Economics beats politics any time." The mighty dynamics of expansion seem...
There appears to be what Wittgenstein called an "unbridgeable gulf" between the brain and the conscious mind. The paradox of the mind-body problem is that the explanatory causes of consciousness in the brain are not discoverable by inspecting the brain, and introspection cannot reveal the rootedness of consciousness in brain tissue. Our modes of knowing about the mind-brain nexus don't home in on the glue that binds the two together...