Word: thinker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Pennsylvania in its birth was a planned society," Bates observes. To his mind Penn was a great political thinker, the Quaker Colony was democracy's brightest hope. While that prurient sadist and hypochondriac, Cotton Mather, was torturing old women for witchcraft in Massachusetts, Penn dismissed a charge of broomstick riding with the remark that there was no law in Pennsylvania against riding on broomsticks. Penn's incredibly dramatic-and in the end tragic-life has nowhere been better told...
Such hardihood was not welcome to Melville's time. But Melville had a spiritual successor in William Graham Sumner, a hardheaded thinker who began at Yale in 1872 a study he called the "science of society." Professor Gabriel is as trenchant, critical and readable on Sumner as he is on Adams, James, Royce and 19th-20th Century thinkers generally. And he rescues Sumner's importance from the forgetful obloquy it has suffered (outside New Haven) in recent years...
...explanation has been that as a journalist he lacks teaching experience. But this is no longer true. For the past two years he has taught at Williams, and has also done a good job at the Harvard Summer School. There is no doubt about his ability as an original thinker; the two books "It Is Later Than You Think" and "Ideas Are Weapons" are no mean achievement for a man of his comparatively few years. He could be a very active tutor, and would certainly be a stimulating one. It is the "middle group," assistant and associate professors, that...
...Russell has been invited to teach courses in mathematics and logic, and not to expound his own personal ethics. With Professor Whitehead, one of the greatest logicians of our day, he has pushed far forward into the tortuous ways of logical analysis. A colorful, ruggedly independent thinker, prevented by his government from accepting a post proferred by Harvard, he was thrown into an English jail in 1918 as a conscientious objector. There he wrote his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, cutting new paths into unexplored realms. Characteristically, he studied Russian Communism on the spot. For some time he lectured at Peking...