Word: thinker
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...Important Thinker...
...sound thinker who takes balanced viewpoints, Engineer-Scientist Quarles as Air Force Secretary maintained deep interest and close touch with his first love-research-but never favored it unreasonably. Nor has he overfavored the Air Force itself.* Preparing a 1958 budget, Quarles helped trim preliminary requests totaling $23 billion down to $17.7 billion. Then he went up Capitol Hill to assure Congress calmly that, rather than ask for more, he felt $17.7 billion was sufficient to buy the kind of airpower the U.S. needs...
Genet, who incidentally is not a professional writer but a criminal with a long prison record, can be seen as a profoundly moralistic thinker. His system, however, is an almost complete reversal of what is usually considered as morality. For him, the absolute goal of human existence is not the attainment of good, but of evil. This state cannot be reached by mere effort--it must, like Calvinistic grace, be conferred from without. Thus he represents Green Eyes' crime as not rationally motivated...
...original sin. Such a theme would be no novelty from François Mauriac or Graham Greene, but it is surprising when it comes from an existentially-minded French intellectual. As a novelist, Camus dissipates his shock effect by telling his story in a long-winded flashback. As a thinker, he remains as provocative, and to many of his French fellow intellectuals as annoying, as an alarm clock going off in the middle of the night...
Tending Towards God. Author Camus is a fascinating case study of a modern thinker caught in a dilemma that is not confined to France or to French intellectuals. He stubbornly clings to the conviction that man is the measure of all things-the sentimental tradition of the Enlightenment. But he is far too intelligent and sensitive to accept the Enlightenment's shallow optimism and Utopian illusions about the human condition. On the other hand, he cannot move in the opposite direction towards religion. He is frozen midway. He accepts the Christian insight into the nature of evil, but rejects...