Word: priori
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have the medical means to save the mother. The case involves a comparison of the life-value of the mother and the child: the final decision must evaluate the process of existence--the value of life as it is lived. The inherent value of life cannot be an a priori constant if a choice is to be made between two lives...
That is the second riddle about Thomas and his philosophy. He bears no resemblance to the fatuous Dr. Pangloss, who chirped about this best world while stumbling through a series of catastrophes. Voltaire's doctor was an a priori optimist, and nothing that he saw or experienced could rattle his foolhardy faith. Thomas reverses this procedure and writes about things he has observed, grounding his conclusions in the tiniest material details that the world can provide. Because he has peered at nature's building blocks more closely than anyone but fellow biologists, and because he can translate...
...which are inexorably destined to take over the newspaper business, the chairmen of the board direct editorial content, although in a more subtle fashion. Rarely does an editor working for a chain newspaper receive a direct order to take certain stands on an issue. Instead the censorship occurs a priori-- when the editor is hired. The businessmen who run the corporation hire the editors who run the papers and write the editorials. Selecting an editor is an elaborate affair: The corporate leaders are careful to pick just their kind of guy and are willing spend many hours over lunch...
...attempt to do so in my piece. I did attempt, however, to expose some of the philosophical assumptions and value-judgements implicit in the study of how genes affect human behavior and society. Not simply judgments about the ultimate value of science--which most scientists seem to accept a priori, forgetting that science arose merely as a means of satisfying basic human needs--but judgments about the necessity of a field of study that quite ostensibly sets out to study how behavior is restricted by our genes...
...having bandied these concepts about for so many years, Greene has gained a reputation for possessing a dose of profundity. Yet Greene's is a worldly wisdom that is never fully-earned. It is a posture of knowing pessimism that we are expected to take as an a priori supposition, and which Greene keeps us from questioning too deeply with his fleeting, almost cinematic prose; he gives a whiff of a deep thought and then moves quickly to another scene, another shot, before we have time to look for the source of the scent. In the place of any real...