The gaze implies a concentration of the spectator's activity into that of looking, the glance implies that no extraordinary effort... is being invested in the activity of looking. The very terms we habitually use to designate the person who watches TV or the cinema screen tend to indicate this difference. The cinema-looker is a spectator: caught by the projection yet separate from its illusion. The TV looker is a viewer, casting a lazy eye over proceedings, keeping an eye on events, or, as the slightly archaic designation had it, "looking in."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us say, then, that both the realist and the antirealist accept the results of scientific investigations as "true," on a par wi...th more homely truths.... And call this acceptance of scientific truths the "core position." What distinguishes realists from antirealists, then, is what they add onto this core position ... a third alternative emerges--and an attractive one at that. It is the core position itself, and all by itself.... Let me introduce the acronym NOA (pronounced as in "Noah"), for natural ontological attitude, and, henceforth, refer to the core position under that designation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Construed ... as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certai...n set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses--those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a period of a people's life that bears the designation "transitional," the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen ...of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... given a choice between hearing my daughter say "I'm pregnant" or "I used a condom," most mothers would get up in the middle of... the night and buy them herself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »