Word: notion
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...somehow the rise of Osama bin Laden and terrorist extremism seems to call progress into question. Bin Laden and his followers embrace a medieval notion of religion and society (except of course when it comes to weapons, when they'd like to be scientifically up-to the minute). They missed out completely on the Enlightenment notion that the sacred and the secular should be kept separate as well as the 18th century notion that mankind had finally entered the age of reason...
Albert Einstein stood common sense on its head when he proclaimed time to be just another dimension, like height, width and depth, and went on to declare that it can be stretched and warped like taffy. But that notion is much too mundane for Julian Barbour. According to the 64-year-old British physicist, there's no point in trying to describe time, because it simply doesn't exist. "The passage of time," he says, "is simply an illusion created by our brains...
Pleasure is Hickey's big idea. In books like The Invisible Dragon and Air Guitar, he has proposed the heretical notion that we should trust our responses. If you like it, it might be good. This seems self-evident, but for years the academic discussion of art was focused on issues of race, gender and class. Pleasure was beside the point. If that moralizing tendency is in eclipse now, it is thanks partly to the persuasive power of Hickey's ideas--and his writing, which is flip, brainy and plainspoken...
...experiment testing those fancy French theories about disease as a social construct. I was officially, publicly healthy. Now, with almost no objective medical change, I am officially, publicly sick. How will that change the actual effect of the disease? Without, I hope, distorting the experiment, I predict that this notion of disease as a function of attitudes about disease will turn out to be more valid than I would have suspected eight years...
Christian faith has long endured the chipping away at authority that is the hallmark of modern academia. But church and campus have never seemed as estranged as they have since the advent of postmodernism, the notion that there is no universal truth, merely competing "narratives" jockeying eternally for supremacy. That is, until 1990, when a young British professor named John Milbank pioneered what The Chronicle of Higher Education has suggested may be the "biggest development in theology since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door...