Word: rationalist
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...disillusioning. Similarly I have taken a class by one Nobel prizewinner, and the single moment I enjoyed most in his course was his discomfiture when the rap session into which he had self-consciously turned one of his classes got out of his control. As a baldingly rationalist would-be hippie should, he had set himself to prove that those of his students who professed to believe in God and those who professed to disbelieve actually shared the same belief, presumably some sort of Siddharthian, soothing idea about the unity of the universe, so he had picked out five atheist...
...economy. But the aggressive humanism of the Renaissance and the mechanistic visions of the scientific revolution shattered that unified cosmos. For more than three centuries, Western civilization has lived instead in a split-level universe conceived by the French philosopher René Descartes. A religious man, but also a rationalist, Descartes contended that man could demonstrate truth only about a world he could measure. The world of spirit was beyond such measurement, a matter of faith and intuition, not truth. Descartes became a self-fulfilling prophet. The spiritual world was left to philosophers and divines, many of whom shared...
...Reality (1971) and the current Journey to Ixtlan (1972), it has made U.S. cult figures of its author and subject ? an anthropologist named Carlos Castaneda and a mysterious old Yaqui Indian from Sonora called Juan Matus. In essence, Castaneda's books are the story of how a European rationalist was initiated into the practice of Indian sorcery. They cover a span of ten years, during which, under the weird, taxing and sometimes comic tutelage of Don Juan, a young academic labored to penetrate and grasp what he calls the "separate reality" of the sor cerer's world. The learning...
...touch like a wall of sol id tinfoil...! remember having to crawl towards a sort of round point where the tunnel ended; when I finally arrived, if I did, I had forgotten all about the dog, Don Juan, and myself." Perhaps most important, Castaneda remained throughout a rationalist Everyman. His one resource was questions: a persistent, often fumbling effort to keep a Socratic dialogue going with Don Juan...
...myth, are well equipped to deal with beasts in jungles, and soon Staunton has identified a number of monsters, including the manticore-a creature with the head of a man, the body of a lion and the tail of a dragon. It is himself, the barbed and beastly rationalist. The colloquies between patient and healer are of a high order; now and then they veer unexpectedly into a mad kind of comedy, as when he tells of the attempt of his socially ambitious stepmother and an inept dentist friend to mold a plastic death mask from his father...