Word: rationalistic
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...told them?arbitrarily, as always?that a non vote would really end his rule. Others, long accustomed to the Gaullist unexpected, wondered whether it was really for keeps, or whether De Gaulle might not still somehow come thundering back into the arena. Above all, the French, the inveterately rationalist sons and daughters of Descartes, set out to reckon a France without De Gaulle and to speculate about the successor who must lead it into the future...
Gloom hung thick over the group of 100 "prominent intellectuals" assembled in Manhattan at a "Theater for Ideas." The question for discussion was "The End of the Rationalist Tradition?"-and the answer seemed obvious. Pronounced Poet Robert Lowell: "The world is absolutely out of control now, and it's not going to be saved by reason or unreason." Said Author Leslie Fiedler: "Reason, although dead, holds us with an embrace that looks like a lovers' embrace but turns out to be rigor mortis. Unless we're necrophiles, we'd better let go." Intoned Norman Mailer: "Somewhere...
...importance of the above in this determination of the precise context in which political action is permissible is that Weber, the arch-rationalist and father of scientific sociology, could do no better than to describe the process in terms as flagrantly imprecise as "somewhere [one] reaches the point" of decision. This failure to be more exact is not due to any lack of mental capacity on Weber's part--it is inherently impossible to find scientific principles on which to base one's judgments and choices...
...Pentheus, Leon Russom is the perfect physical contrast to O'Connor, while at the same time an exceptionally able and disciplined actor. In his characterization, however, lies a failure of definition that badly undercuts the action of the play. Pentheus must metamorphosize somewhere along the line from a hyper-rationalist into a pathetic, obsessed figure; and Russom, or Mayer, has chosen the wrong moment for the metamorphosis. When Pentheus emerges from the ruins of his palace, razed to the ground by Dionysus, he should be a changed man, brought low like his palace and therefore susceptible...
...Harvard freshman I was an innocent rationalist and Wilsonian Democrat. Even while I was an undergraduate, and with the generous enthusiasm of my tutor Harold Laski to fortify me, the influence of the late Irving Babbitt began to undermine the foundations of that belief...