As revealed in "Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt," a thoughtful, nuanced examination of a complex thinker, Arendt's willingness to challenge certainties and go against the grain lent her thoughts on topics like totalitarianism and the plight of refugees a force and originality that make them surprisingly relevant today.
Challenging certainties is an exercise which every clinician should do in order to keep his mind open in his profession.
The war there will not only give them lasting nightmares, but will also challenge every certainty they'd once held — about themselves, about human nature, about fate and the randomness of life.
As ready to puncture mainstream Protestant sanctimony as he was to challenge conservative certainty, Niebuhr emerged an itinerant apostle of "pessimistic optimism," in the words of one of his students, Robert McAfee Brown.
Change often requires that we learn new skills and build new habits, which challenge the certainty of our current actions and can make us feel we're losing control.
There are no equal number of reports to challenge the certainty of 207 scientists that vastly more acreage must be allocated to marshes to store and clean dirty water so Florida's estuaries don't get puked on and the Everglades and Florida Bay can someday revive.
"I know how to count," he said at a House hearing early in his tenure when a Republican challenged his certainty on the climate science.
Moreover, with the development of medicine and the big bang of medical knowledge, critical thinking encourages doctors to challenge apparent certainties and uncover useful information.
However, this is part of the wider debate that challenges the certainty and status with which the biological sciences are viewed compared with the psychosocial sciences within medicine and medical education [ 37].
The prospect not only of widening conflict, but also of new precedents challenging old certainties of international life, causes deep concern in Western Europe and the United States.
Neither the evil witch nor the saviour- of-our-great-nation brigades could cope with that because it challenged their certainties.
