And yet, when it comes to politics, a great scholarly mind, surveying the grand sweep of history from Olympian heights, can sometimes overlook matters closer to earth.
Some evolutionary biologists claim that the scholarly mind is an historical anomaly: that humans, like other primates, are designed to scan rapidly for danger and opportunity.
Apples began to appeal to the scholarly mind in the 1790s with Thomas Payne Knight breeding apples just up the road from where I live.
She has the clear delivery and scholarly mind of one of those people who could lose themselves for days in the British Museum without once looking for the mummified cats.
Thanks to the efforts of Mr. Swinburne and a handful of other nimble scholarly minds -- including Alvin Plantinga at the University of Notre Dame and Nicholas Wolterstorff at Yale -- religious belief no longer languishes in a state of philosophical disrepute.
You can imagine the scholarly minds of the Renaissance didn't weigh too heavily on their testimonies.
Consequently, Mr Stubbs does not offer a new Donne, but does offer a fairly thorough account of the one we know.The trouble is that his biography seems to have been written with both a popular and a scholarly readership in mind.
The book seems to be written with a general, rather than a scholarly, audience in mind; Berck's prose is straightforward and easy to follow.
And so even, according to the new view espoused by Heller, the rational test of actual experience should still trump the Kabbalah of eighteenth-century-word scrutiny, however exciting it may be to pseudo-scholarly minds.
The author of "On Being Certain" and the coming "A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind," Dr. Burton is a contributor to a scholarly yet surprisingly sprightly volume called "Pathological Altruism," to be published this fall by Oxford University Press.
