Word Finder - thinker

definition

One who spends time thinking, contemplating or meditating.

definition

An intellectual, such as a philosopher or theologian.

He was both a strategic thinker and capable of detailed execution.

He was a great thinker and a great doer, and with Washington he helped to make our country free.

A strong writer and thinker, his spirit was essentially unifying and sympathetic, in an age when these qualities won little sympathy.

The serious thinker will always repeat the words of Kant that, in itself, scepticism is " not a permanent resting-place for human reason."

His powers as an original thinker were not equal to his learning and his literary gifts, as was shown in his opposition to the philosophy of Kant.

Origen was quite as independent a thinker as Plotinus; only, they both drew on the same tradition.

He took other men's labour as his due, and impressed their words, of which he had suggested the underlying ideas, with the stamp of his own individuality; his collaborators themselves did not complain - they were but too glad to be of help in the great work of controlling and forwarding the French Revolution through its greatest thinker and orator.

Oncken, to take the extreme of condemnation, looks upon him as a bad physiocrat and a confused thinker, while Leon Say considers that he was the founder of modern political economy, and that "though he failed in the 18th century he triumphed in the 1 9th."

Lassalle did not lay claim to any special originality as a socialistic thinker, nor did he publish any systematic statement of his views.

Though not a profound and systematic philosophical thinker, Thomasius prepared the way for great reforms in philosophy, and, above all, in law, literature, social life and theology.

Its conclusions are predetermined, and the initiative of the individual thinker is almost confined, therefore, to formal details in the treatment of his thesis.

The life of Martineau was so essentially the life of the thinker, and was so typical of the century in which he lived and the society within which he moved, that he can be better understood through his spoken mind than through his outward history.

The situation was saved by a newspaper whicl from the outset of its career obeyed the best canons of journalism - Born in 1882, the fiji Shimpo (Times) enjoyed the immense advan tage of having its policy controlled by one of the greatest thinker of modern Japan, Fukuzawa Yukichi.

Whitefield was the greater orator, Wesley the better thinker; but, diverse in temperament as they were, they alike laid emphasis on openair preaching.

During the next two days the emperor examined his situation and dictated a series of notes which have been a puzzle to every strategical thinker ever since.

From these results we see that Shaftesbury, opposed to Hobbes and Locke, is in close agreement with Hutcheson, and that he is ultimately a deeply religious thinker, inasmuch as he discards the moral sanction of public opinion, the terrors of future punishment, the authority' of the civil authority, as the main incentives to goodness, and substitutes the voice of conscience and the love of God.

Bacon, it is now said, was not appreciated by his age because he was in advance of it; he is no schoolman, but a modern thinker, whose conceptions of science are more just and clear than are even those of his more celebrated namesake.'

But he was a preacher rather than a thinker, a reformer rather than a philosopher.

But Lucretius, if less original as a thinker, was probably a much greater poet than Empedocles.

But the chief value of Lucretius as a thinker lies in his firm grasp of speculative ideas, and in his application of them to the interpretation of human life and nature.

We see the debt, and we also see that when it is stated at the highest possible, nothing has really been taken either from Comte's claims as a powerful original thinker, or from his immeasurable pre-eminence over Saint-Simon in intellectual grasp and vigour and coherence.

Comte is in no true sense a follower of Saint-Simon, but it was undoubtedly Saint-Simon who launched him, to take Comte's own word, by suggesting the two starting-points of what grew into the Comtist system - first, that political phenomena are as capable of being grouped under laws as other phenomena; and second, that the true destination of philosophy must be social, and the true object of the thinker must be the reorganization of the moral, religious and political systems. We can readily see what an impulse these far-reaching conceptions would give to Comte's meditations.

The 19th century had no more reverent thinker than Martineau; the awe of the Eternal was the very atmosphere that he breathed, and he looked at man with the compassion of one whose thoughts were full of God.

He at once gave evidence of unusual ability both as an original thinker and skilful experimenter.

He was not a great original thinker; he lacked the creative faculty and the creative impulse.

Its meaning varies (a) according to the various definitions of deity, and especially (b) according as it is (i.) deliberately adopted by a thinker as a description of his own theological standpoint, or (ii.) applied by one set of thinkers to their opponents.

Just as the Gathas (the ancient Zoroastrian hymns) omit Gaokerena, and the Hebrew prophets on the whole avoid mythological phrases, so this old Hebrew thinker prunes the primitive exuberance of the traditional myth.

And even when a thinker puts forward his doubt as absolute it does not follow that his successors are bound to regard it in the same light.

But he was eminently a safe man, not an original thinker, but a counsellor of unrivalled wisdom.

It is not unfair to connect the apparent failings of Schelling's philosophizing with the very nature of the thinker and with the historical accidents of his career.

It lay in the very nature of this thought that Spinoza should now offer himself to Schelling as the thinker whose form of presentation came nearest to his new problem.

As A Scholar, A ` Thinker, And A Master Of Pure English He Has Exerted A Marked Influence Upon Canadian Literature And Canadian Life.

There are three alternatives, which may be put as questions which every thinker must ask himself.

Vico was the first thinker who asked, Why have we a science of nature, but no science of history?

As a constructive thinker, he did little.

It was reserved for Dr Benrath to justify him, and to represent him as a fervent evangelist and at the same time as a speculative thinker with a passion for free inquiry.

As a thinker he was not original, and even as a theologian he has produced but few schemes of doctrine, except his doctrine of sin.

Sherman was not a deep and original thinker like James Wilson, nor was he a brilliant leader like Alexander Hamilton; but owing to his conservative temperament, his sound judgment and his wide experience he was well qualified to lead the compromise cause in the convention of 1787.

He is not a systematic thinker, but is too much affected by the eclectic notion of reconciling all philosophies.

So that in Rome also Cynicism was partly the butt of the satirist and partly the ideal of the thinker.

Though Mill appears here purely as the disciple of Ricardo, striving after more precise statement, and reaching forward to further consequences, we can well understand in reading these essays how about the time when he first sketched them he began to be conscious of power as an original and independent thinker.

Diogenes Laortius and Cicero both speak of him with respect and describe him as an accurate and polished thinker.

But in this aspect he is rather to be regarded as the diligent expositor of other men's views than as an original thinker.

What chiefly distinguishes him from his Greek prototypes is that his purpose is rather ethical than purely speculative; the zeal of a teacher and reformer is more strong in him than even the intellectual passion of a thinker.

Even if there were no such unmistakable expressions as these, the most cursory glance into Saint-Simon's writings is enough to reveal the thread of connexion between the ingenious visionary and the systematic thinker.

There he came under the influence of Kant, who was just then passing from physical to metaphysical problems. Without becoming a disciple of Kant, young Herder was deeply stimulated to fresh critical inquiry by that thinker's revolutionary ideas in philosophy.

It was at this time also that he became known in the world of letters, the intellectual subtlety and literary capacity of his Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) suggesting that he might make a reputation as a speculative thinker.

Her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, shared the duties of her chief counsellor with William Maitland of Lethington, the keenest and most liberal thinker in the country.

He investigated the early history of Christianity and penetrated more deeply than any contemporary thinker into the significance of Spinoza's philosophy.

Reimarus (1694-1768), professor of oriental languages in Hamburg, who commanded general respect as a scholar and thinker, wrote a book entitled Apologie oder Schutzschrift fiir die verniinftigen Verehrer Gottes.