Word: skepticism
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Karmel's Restif, splendid fellow, is not only a gossipist and eavesdropper but an aging whoremonger, moralist, printer and pamphleteer, skeptic, citizen, sentimentalist and night-prowling philosopher. He catches perfectly the queerness of the scene when he does reach the Bastille: "The fortress is being looted. From the high towers precious documents float down into the moat." He records the rainy grayness of Paris and the strange periods of calm when the Revolution catches its breath ("Most people lost interest . . . The price of bread continued to rise"). He sees the city's whores applaud a lynching "with their...
...great potential in the urban studies program," he insists. "But when we begin to take those new ideas out into the cities and try to put them into action," he worries that Rutgers-"Big Father across the river"-will block student projects that become too radical. Says another black skeptic: "If Livingston takes the revolutionaries off the streets, who's going to be left out there running the business?" But he adds: "You got to have college to survive...
Less than 35 per cent thought that discipline of the demonstrators was too lenient. One skeptic commented, "What was the discipline? Three nights without television...
...wastrels repent, the righte ous stand firm, and all go to heaven or hell according to their merits. Singer is neither a skeptic nor a dogmatist. To those brought up on a steady diet of realism and humanism. his simple faith is refreshing. "When I'm in trouble I pray," he said. And since I'm always in trouble I'm always praying." But he seldom goes to synagogue. "If I had small children, I would take them to synagogue . . because small children need organized religion." he said. Singer's God is a paternal God who listens to our prayers...
...Russell's thought that had primacy and gave weight to the workings of his large and sometimes foolish heart. Skeptic, agnostic and above all rationalist, he won his first fame as a mathematician, later as a philosopher by creatively applying mathematical methods to the linguistic mysteries of meaning. His most notable work, Principia Mathematica, written with the collaboration of his fellow mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, is a bench mark of 20th century philosophy. Paradoxically, though, Russell was less a man of the 20th century than the last of the eminent, eccentric Victorian rebels...