Word: skepticism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since the Enlightenment, though, philosophers have not been impressed. The great skeptic was David Hume (1711-76), who scoffed at the design argument because nature is so savage and wasteful that it might have been the work of "some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." Turned inside out, the proof is really a question: Could this intricate universe have evolved by pure trial and error? The last major philosopher to promote the argument, Britain's F.R. Tennant, wrote in 1934: "Presumably the world is comparable with a single throw of the dice. And common...
...have to squint hard to find inconsistencies like these, though, and aurally if not physically the music works. More curious and ironic is the presence onstage of Robert Brustein, ART's director and a philosopher of the theater in his own right, as Theseus, that unrepentant skeptic with no faith in drama or poetry. This, after all, is the character who delivers the famous speech lumping lovers, poets and madmen together as creatures of imagination, flighty and deluded...