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Category: Great Minds

Great Minds
Hot and Wild Sufficiency: 
Epicurus, the Mehness of Death, and the Pleasures of Enough
Volume 39, No. 2
February / March, 2019
Dale DeBakcsy

A hunk of cheese. A glass of watered-down wine. The company of a good friend. That, according to the most influential philosopher of the Hellenistic Age, is pretty much the summit of human happiness. Epicurus of Samos (341 bce–270 bce) inherited an Athens that had been broken by the Macedonian might of Alexander the Great …

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Great Minds
The Sweet Tyranny of Other People: Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury, and the World Beyond Belief
Volume 39, No. 1
December / January, 2019
Dale DeBakcsy

Bloomsbury. A century ago that word stood for everything loathsome to the dying Victorian Age. Homosexuality and impiety, infidelity and socialism, all were embraced at one time or another by the roughly dozen figures of the Bloomsbury Group while even the most freethinking of their Imperial elders scratched their heads, wondering what their small acts …

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Great Minds
Virginia Woolf Excerpt
Volume 39, No. 1
December / January, 2019
Virginia Woolf

From Mrs. Dalloway. (Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1953 Paperback edition), pp. 186–192. Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh; but had her reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty; and did not, after all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; degradingly poor. Otherwise she would not …

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Great Minds
Humanism’s Future Circumstances: The Godless Galaxyscapes of Iain M. Banks
Volume 38, No. 6
October / November, 2018
Dale DeBakcsy

So, what does a purely humanist civilization look like? What do people do and need, when it is taken as given that life is material and beyond it lies nothing?” For decades, the best we could do in answering this question as to the lived-in feel of a prospective humanist society was to point toward …

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Great Minds
Excerpt from “Piece,” in State of the Art
Volume 38, No. 6
October / November, 2018
Iain M. Banks

It was … 1975, I think; have to check my diaries to be sure. I’d finished at Uni that spring and gone off hitchhiking through Europe over the summer. Paris, Bergen, Berlin, Venice, Rabat and Madrid defined the limits of the whirlwind tour. Three months later I was on my way home, and after staying …

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Great Minds
Voices from the Past: Recalling ‘the Good, the Beautiful, and the True’
Volume 38, No. 5
August / September, 2018

I have always been struck by the way people go through life oblivious to past struggles to understand life, ignorant of the intellectual tools and creative efforts by which distant or past cultures have benefited. As Bertrand Russell wrote in his 1937 essay “On Being Modern-Minded”: We imagine ourselves at the apex of intelligence, and …

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Great Minds
Optimism from the Ashes: The Galactic Humanism of Isaac Asimov
Volume 38, No. 2
February / March, 2018
Dale DeBakcsy

Asimov dared to ask how humanity would be saved from enervation brought on by its own success.

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Great Minds
Religion and Science Fiction
Volume 38, No. 2
February / March, 2018
Isaac Asimov

Asimov considers science fiction’s obligation toward religious sensitivities.

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Great Minds
What God Didn’t and Kant Couldn’t: Richard Rorty and the World after Philosophy
Volume 37, No. 6
October / November, 2017
Dale DeBakcsy

From Plato to Kant to Russell, philosophy has been in the business of describing the mind in a way unavailable to the lesser disciplines.

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Great Minds
Private Irony and Liberal Hope
Volume 37, No. 6
October / November, 2017
Richard Rorty

The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society . . . consists in little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard “bourgeois freedoms.”

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Great Minds
The Wickedest Man in San Francisco: Ambrose Bierce and Cynicism’s Battling Prime
Volume 37, No. 4
June / July, 2017
Dale DeBakcsy

Ambrose Bierce, the compleat cynic whose insights sear even as they sparkle.

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Great Minds
The Devil’s Dictionary
Volume 37, No. 4
June / July, 2017
Ambrose Bierce

“Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”

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Great Minds
Determinism in the Courtroom: The Other Legacy of Clarence Darrow
Volume 37, No. 1
December / January, 2017
Dale DeBakcsy

“Darrow’s approach remained the same:
a full and frank determinism with a boundless empathy
t its core.”

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Great Minds
Child Training
Volume 37, No. 1
December / January, 2017
Clarence Darrow

“People talk of criminals as though they were utterly different from ‘good’ people.”

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Great Minds
Coming Together: How Baron d’Holbach Made Atheism a Movement
Volume 36, No. 6
October / November, 2016
Dale DeBakcsy

“For pure, unadulterated, We-Are-Atheists-Hear-Us-Roar unity and
pride, there was one beginning and one place to be: Thursday evenings at Baron d’Holbach’s joint.”

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Great Minds
Selections from Le Bon Sens (Good Sense)
Volume 36, No. 6
October / November, 2016
Baron d’Holbach

In every way the reality of man negates the goodness of God.

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Great Minds
Normalizing Blasphemy: Robert Ingersoll and Freethought’s Great Awakening
Volume 36, No. 5
August / September, 2016
Dale DeBakcsy

Above all Robert Ingersoll demonstrated that an exuberant, joyful life without religion was possible.

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Great Minds
Some Mistakes of Moses
Volume 36, No. 5
August / September, 2016
Robert Green Ingersoll, Robert Green Ingersoll

“Theologians have filled thousands of volumes with abuse of this serpent, but it seems that he told the exact truth.”

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Great Minds
The People’s Deist: Thomas Paine
Volume 36, No. 3
April / May, 2016
Dale DeBakcsy

“Paine would suffer for this book, but then he had suffered for every book he had ever written.”

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Great Minds
The Age of Reason, Part II
Volume 36, No. 3
April / May, 2016
Thomas Paine

“Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author . . . and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies.”

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Great Minds
H.L. Mencken: Scourge of the Booboisie
Volume 36, No. 2
February / March, 2016
Dale DeBakcsy

“He was a cultural commentator who helped usher in a new era
of American thought, and then he arbitrarily dug in his heels against any further progress
nce he saw his gals achieved.”

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Great Minds
Walter Kaufmann: The Man Who Saved Heresy
Volume 35, No. 6
October / November, 2015
Dale DeBakcsy

Walter Kaufmann saved skepticism, almost singlehandedly, from McCarthyite repression and Eisenhoweresque torpor.

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Great Minds
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Volume 35, No. 5
August / September, 2015
James A. Haught

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar unlocked the secrets of dwarf stars and black holes, but never needed the belief in God.

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Great Minds
A Century of Main Street: The Freethinking Legacy of Sinclair Lewis
Volume 35, No. 3
April / May, 2015
Dale DeBakcsy

It would be a mistake to consider the works of Sinclair Lewis irrelevant to modern times and freethought’s role.

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Great Minds
Lorraine Hansberry: Writing in the Light of Reason
Volume 34, No. 3
April / May, 2014
Becca Challman

Lorraine Hansberry’s drama stressed both the humanity of humanism and the need for critical thinking.

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Great Minds
Critias of Athens
Volume 32, No. 2
February / March, 2012

Critias? In the Great Minds series? Have we run out of really great minds already? Who was this guy Critias anyway? (And how do you pronounce his name?) The last question is the easiest to answer. There are two choices in pronounciation: to Americanize or to pseudo-Hellenize. The Americanized form, used even by professional classicists, …

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Great Minds
Ashley Montagu: A Commentator on Nearly Everything Human
Volume 31, No. 4
June / July, 2011
Jeannette Lowen

The resonant voice of Ashley Montagu (1905–1999), London-born anthropologist, social biologist, and anatomist, rang throughout the twentieth century. He was an often controversial, highly influential scientist, humanist, and witness-participant in the world around him. Named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 1995, Montagu sought to demystify the social sciences. His life’s …

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Great Minds
Huckleberry Finn, American Secularist
Volume 31, No. 3
April / May, 2011
Reid Hardaway

More than one hundred years have passed since the death of one of America’s finest wits, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). His characters still live on in the national imagination. They are stark images, as rough and ready as the everyman, and they shine light on the nature of what it means to be American. …

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Great Minds
An Epicurean Alternative to Religion
Volume 31, No. 1
December / January, 2011
Priscilla Sakezles

Philosophy and science were invented in ancient Greece by people uncorrupted by the monotheism that has shaped our culture. With the exception of Plato, Greeks tended to be humanists, naturalists, and religious skeptics. Though many of their scientific theories are wrong, there is a wealth of wisdom to be gained from studying their views on …

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Great Minds
Andrew Dickson White
Volume 30, No. 6
October / November, 2010
Tom Flynn

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) did more than any other American to impress upon late – nineteenth – and twentieth-century thought the idea that science and religion are enemies locked in combat on an almost military scale. Ironically, this was precisely the opposite of his intent. Born on November 7, 1832, in Homer, New York, into …

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Great Minds
Robert Frost: Showing Off to the Devil
Volume 30, No. 4
June / July, 2010
Gary Sloan

An obscure New England farmer and teacher until his first book of verse, A Boy’s Will, was published in 1913, Robert Frost (1874–1963) died an international celebrity. He garnered four Pulitzer Prizes and was awarded forty-four honorary degrees. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and other anthology …

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Great Minds
Stephen Crane: The Black Badge of Unbelief
Volume 30, No. 2
February / March, 2010
Gary Sloan

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was a literary prodigy. As a nineteen-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, he drafted the seminal novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. This gritty, unsentimental portrait of Bowery lowlifes initiated modern American fiction. It was the first native specimen of literary naturalism. Crane said of the novel: “I tried to make plain …

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Great Minds
Emily Dickinson: Pagan Sphinx
Volume 30, No. 1
December / January, 2010
Gary Sloan

That no Flake of [snow] fall on you or them—is a wish that would be a Prayer, were Emily not a Pagan. —Letter to Catherine Sweetser, 1878 When Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) died, she was virtually unknown to the public. Only seven of her poems had been published, a few without permission, and they attracted little …

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Great Minds
On the Bicentennial of the Death of Thomas Paine, June 8, 1809
Volume 29, No. 4
June / July, 2009
Kenneth W. Burchell

Thomas Paine’s story is the story of America. To understand what happened to the revolutionary experiment that began at Lexington and Concord with the 1775 “sho t heard round the world”—to understand how we ended up in the present financial morass, the legacy of the so-called unitary executive—there is no better model than Paine’s life …

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Great Minds
A Great Humanist: William James
Volume 29, No. 1
December / January, 2009
John Shook

One of America’s great humanists was the philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910). James served as a vital bridge between the humanism of the transcendentalists and the revival of humanism in the 1920s and 30s. His largest contribution to humanism consisted in his eagerness to champion the individual person and the personal perspective, the direct …

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Great Minds
What Makes a Life Significant
Volume 29, No. 1
December / January, 2009
William James

The following passages have been selected from the first publication of the essay “What Makes a Life Significant” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life& rsquo;s Ideals (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1899), pp. 265–301.—Eds. A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly …

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Great Minds
Shelley the Atheist
Volume 28, No. 6
October / November, 2008
Gary Sloan

Though in his lifetime his poetry was seldom praised, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) is now ensconced in the pantheon of English poets. His “Ode to the West Wind,” “Ozymandias,” “To a Skylark,” “The Cloud,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” “Adonais,” and “Prometheus Unbound” are entrenched in anthologies of literature and studied throughout the world. …

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Great Minds
Lord Byron and the Demons of Calvinism
Volume 28, No. 1
December / January, 2008
Gary Sloan

George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), was once the most celebrated poet in Europe. Handsome and charismatic, he was the darling of polite society, the cynosure of salons, a pacesetter in fashion and mannerism, the observed of all observers. Smitten debutantes, madams, and maidservants vied for the attention of the dashing peer of the realm. …

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Great Minds
Thus Spoke Friedrich Nietzsche
Volume 27, No. 5
August / September, 2007
Jeannette Lowen
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Great Minds
Emanuel Haldeman-Julius
Volume 27, No. 4
June / July, 2007
Timothy Binga
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