Word: pragmatists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...totalitarians. He was simply impatient with his fellow academicians and their endless hairsplitting over matters that had no relation to life. A vibrant, generous person, he hoped to show that religious emotions, even those of the deranged, were crucial to human life. The great virtue of The Varieties, noted Pragmatist Philosopher Charles Peirce, is its "penetration into the hearts of people." Its great weakness, retorted George Santayana, is its "tendency to disintegrate the idea of truth, to recommend belief without reason and to encourage superstition...
Some politicians criticize Lemass for being too much of a pragmatist. "He's a bit of a fly-boy," said Labor Party Leader James Larkin. "He trims his sails to different winds." The greatest challenge that Lemass has to face as a politician is to revitalize drab, unimaginative Fianna Fail, many of whose front-bench heroes of destiny have been around since Dev first came to office. Seven of the 13 members of the Lemass Cabinet are 60 or under, which is a relatively green age in Irish politics but hardly green enough...
Elegant and lanky, Schweitzer, 51, is not expected to make sudden or radical changes at the IMF. He is a pragmatist, and is wary of grandiose global formulas for solving the world's fiscal troubles. "I'm not an economist in my own right," says Schweitzer. "I'm a general practitioner." He believes that the IMF should concentrate its attention on the underdeveloped nations, feels that there should be a gradual increase in the world's money supply to finance increasing world trade. But he insists that any increase in funds should be initiated by national...
Toward the end of his life James propounded the doctrine of "radical empiricism." He regarded it as independent of pragmatism--that is, one may completely reject it and remain a pragmatist. But he came to consider this doctrine more fundamental and more significant than the pragmatic principle. James states the basic claim of his radical empiricism as follows...
...conscious will but by his unconscious drives. Sociology, invented by the French Philosopher Auguste Comte?who visualized a scientific religion worshipping a "great being" that was actually humanity itself?says that man is only the product of his environment. No votary of Comte's, the American pragmatist William James told the individual that he stands at the very center of his world, and yet in the end everything in the pragmatic view of man is relative and transitional. How much use the philosopher is in this situation is perfectly summarized by the note found on James's desk after...