Word: cartesian
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...lesser accolade. Some critics maintain that he wrote the same play 39 times in 35 years (1881-1916). That is only half-true. Feydeau's plots are like the Minotaur's labyrinth, except that they are apoplectically funny. One is led on and on with a zany Cartesian logic, but one can never retrace one's steps and relate the story coherently...
Jethro Tull is back in town this weekend. The band's been hanging on for a long time so they must be doing something right. The weekend's concert is entitled "A Passion Play"; a Cartesian mind like mine assumes that Anderson and his gang will be performing stuff from the new album of the same name. Ian Anderson traditionally puts on a good show for his audience -- the way he handles his flute is a master-piece of modern erotic theater. With Livingston Taylor, Boston Garden, Friday and Saturday...
...position is odd. The products of a foe of "orthodox" beauty, his tarry clumps of mud and orange peel, highly insured, decorate half the bon bourgeois salons of Paris. The author of many eloquent tracts, he speaks in defense of incoherence and illiteracy as poetic principles. An intellectual, Cartesian to the fingertips and a close friend of such literary eminences as Raymond Queneau, Jean Paulhan and FranÇois Ponge, he has based 30 years of work on the premise that Western culture is a grotesque irrelevancy. Dubuffet is indeed a quintessentially French figure...
...contended that man could demonstrate truth only about a world he could measure. The world of spirit was beyond such measurement, a matter of faith and intuition, not truth. Descartes became a self-fulfilling prophet. The spiritual world was left to philosophers and divines, many of whom shared the Cartesian bias that theirs was an ephemeral discipline. The physical world became the domain of Western science, though man sometimes seemed less the master of that world than its mechanic...
Vilfredo Pareto, a 19th century economist, had a theory: if A equals a given income, and B equals the number of people in a country with incomes greater than A; and if the logarithms of A and B are plotted on the Cartesian y axis and x axis, respectively, the resulting curve will be inclined by approximately 56°. In other words, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor...