Last year, in the Guardian, I wrote about the discovery of Exxon's secret climate documents, saying: "it seems crucial simply to say, for the record, the truth: this company had the singular capacity to change the course of world history for the better and instead it changed that course for the infinitely worse".
Mental properties are accorded an ineliminable and (given Anomalous Monism) irreducible explanatory role by virtue of their singular capacity to make intelligible the occurrence of other mental properties through the sui generis relation of rationalization.
These include the rapid exploration of its environment through flexible phenotypic shifts, unusual longevity, re-connection with its evolutionary path, and its singular capacity to elude the normal cellular checkpoints that constitute the regular orderliness of cellular life.
Above all, someone through whom he could stoke his singular capacity for obsession.
"[T]his company had the singular capacity to change the course of world history for the better and instead it changed that course for the infinitely worse," McKibben wrote.
"He possessed a singular combination of fiery imagination, capacity for meticulous observation, moral passion and intellectual gaiety," wrote Isaiah Berlin, "with a talent for writing in a manner at once pungent and distinguished, ironical and incandescent, brilliantly entertaining and at times rising to great nobility of feeling and expression".
Instead, I had a singular happiness that I had the community, the Christianity and the capacity to make this choice.
Studies have indicated that East Africans do not possess a "running gene" that gives them a singular edge; all élite long-distance athletes have favorable biomechanics and a strong capacity to utilize oxygen.
Even with the passing of a half-century, the Marshall Plan stands out as a singular example of enlightened statecraft -- and also as a testimonial to America's unsurpassed economic capacity following World War II.
It is a singular document.
