Word: thinker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...initial difficulty attendant to this problem is finding a good definition of the term "whole man." Is he the "complete Rabelaisian man" to whom Aldous Huxley refers: "great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover, clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs?" To know whether or not Harvard trains "whole men" it is necessary to know what such men are and it will be difficult to arrive at any definition which will not either outrage the convictions of a segment of the student body or else be so abstract as to be meaningless. Furthermore...
...thousands who celebrated the day, it did not seem funny at all. For at 90, John Dewey was still the nation's most noted living philosopher, who had perhaps had more influence on 20th Century America than any other thinker of his day. He had changed the lot of U.S. schoolchildren and molded the minds of their teachers. Supreme Court justices had felt his influence and so had historians, psychologists, artists and politicians. He was the philosopher of a changing America which had found Europe's formal philosophic traditions hard to adapt to day-to-day living...
...time when the job needed doing, was to cudgel Comstockery and hack at hypocrisy, and he did both with a zest that makes his pages effervesce 30 years after their subjects were topical. Mencken, whatever the college boys may have thought a quarter-century ago, was no great thinker; he was a man of stout prejudices, with a gift and vocabulary for iconoclastic expression even richer than Mark Twain's. In the word's true sense he was, like Thoreau, a radical. But he was also a political conservative, to the dismay of the assorted pinks and reds...
...tradition of shortsighted reaction; the action of the State Department, if not expected, was not a great shock; but the alliance of Schlesinger with the bogus A.I.F. was certainly a surprise in his own community, which has come to think of him as a sober and considered political thinker. The Conference he chose to attack probably won't accomplish anything, thanks to the opposition to it. His opposition is justified on the grounds of personal belief; but more reasoned and more careful disapproval might have carried more weight and would certainly have been a wiser way of attacking a subject...
Budapest-born (1905) Arthur Koestler, one of the best political-novelists of the last decade (Darkness at Noon), is also a stubborn, highly independent thinker-a religious skeptic whose materialism is spiced with idealistic fervor, a radical in search of something to replace his lost faith in Communism. In The Yogi and the Commissar (TIME, June 4, 1945) Koestler tried to find a workable compromise between the pure, but passive life of the sage, and the earthy, but highly active existence of the political reformer. In his new book he stabs at a more ambitious project-"an inclusive theory...