His belief that the self, far from settling the question "Who am I?," kept leaping ahead of its last convictions was in fact so radical that for centuries people looking for precedents had to resort to a few fragments of Heraclitus on the nature of time and change — or, eventually, to give up and simply describe Montaigne as "the first modern man".
He has a way of biting off the ends of his sentences that makes them sound definitive as if the argument was settled, the point self-evident.
If ever Israel needed a U.S. defense secretary who was committed to Israel's survival, as Hagel has repeatedly stated — but who was convinced that ensuring that survival didn't mean having America go along with Israel's self-destructive drift into settling the West Bank and obviating a two-state solution — it is now.
Now that the dust has started to settle, the problems seem self-evident: a director who overstayed his welcome, a voice for change that rubbed people the wrong way and an institution still struggling to create a relevant role for itself and to forge links with Irish artists.
For the most part, I endorse both the interpretation of these results and the recognition by Baracchi et al. that further research is needed to settle the question of self-medication.
Neither reason, grace, nor considerations of self-interest could settle the problem of the passions once and for all.
As the album canters to its close, the ruminations become more self-reflective – literally so in "A Pin-Light Bent", where Newsom's solo harp pulses a two-note figure as she muses on the nature of the Self, settling on an image of it as light shining through a pin-hole.
Bear in mind that settling for self-certified, poor quality hardware will only be cheap initially.
That was the verdict on Ed Miliband's energy price cap eventually settled on by the self-appointed sages of all parties in SW1 – after, that is, their initial dismissal of a dangerous Bolshevik ruse ran up against awkward opinion poll evidence indicating that the voters were keen.
"The Truth" is much better whenever it settles, less self-consciously, into the terrain of tragicomedy, the bleak but funny landscape of Samuel Beckett's forlorn tramps, marking time while awaiting their inevitable ends.
