Intellectual Entertainments
Intellectual Entertainments

Author: P. M. S. Hacker

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2019-10-28

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1785271539

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'Intellectual Entertainments' consists of eight philosophical dialogues, each with five participants, some living, some imaginary and some dead. The dialogues take place either in Elysium or in an imaginary Oxford Common Room. Each historical figure speaks in his own idiom with a distinctive turn of phrase. The imaginary figures speak in the accent and idiom of their respective countries (English, Scottish, American, Australian). The themes are the nature of the mind and the relation between mind and body; the nature of consciousness and its demystification; the nature of thought and its relation to speech; and the objectivity or subjectivity of perceptual qualities such as colour, sound, smell, taste and warmth. Each participant presents a different point of view and defends his position against the arguments of the others. No philosophical knowledge is presupposed.

Great Minds Don’t Think Alike
Great Minds Don’t Think Alike

Author: Marcelo Gleiser

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-02-08

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0231555377

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Does technology change who we are, and if so, in what ways? Can humanity transcend physical bodies and spaces? Will AI and genetic engineering help us reach new heights or will they unleash dystopias? How do we face mortality, our own and that of our warming planet? Questions like these—which are only growing more urgent—can be answered only by drawing on different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing. They challenge us to bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities and bring together perspectives that are too often kept apart. Great Minds Don’t Think Alike presents conversations among leading scientists, philosophers, historians, and public intellectuals that exemplify openness to diverse viewpoints and the productive exchange of ideas. Pulitzer and Templeton Prize winners, MacArthur “genius” grant awardees, and other acclaimed writers and thinkers debate the big questions: who we are, the nature of reality, science and religion, consciousness and materialism, and the mysteries of time. In so doing, they also inquire into how uniting experts from different areas of study to consider these topics might help us address the existential risks we face today. Convened and moderated by the physicist and author Marcelo Gleiser, these public dialogues model constructive engagement between the sciences and the humanities—and show why intellectual cooperation is necessary to shape our collective future. Contributors include David Chalmers and Antonio Damasio; Sean Carroll and B. Alan Wallace; Patricia Churchland and Jill Tarter; Rebecca Goldstein and Alan Lightman; Jimena Canales and Paul Davies; Ed Boyden and Mark O’Connell; Elizabeth Kolbert and Siddhartha Mukherjee; Jeremy DeSilva, David Grinspoon, and Tasneem Zehra Husain.

Hermeneutica
Hermeneutica

Author: Geoffrey Rockwell

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0262545896

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An introduction to text analysis using computer-assisted interpretive practices, accompanied by example essays that illustrate the use of these computational tools. The image of the scholar as a solitary thinker dates back at least to Descartes' Discourse on Method. But scholarly practices in the humanities are changing as older forms of communal inquiry are combined with modern research methods enabled by the Internet, accessible computing, data availability, and new media. Hermeneutica introduces text analysis using computer-assisted interpretive practices. It offers theoretical chapters about text analysis, presents a set of analytical tools (called Voyant) that instantiate the theory, and provides example essays that illustrate the use of these tools. Voyant allows users to integrate interpretation into texts by creating hermeneutica—small embeddable “toys” that can be woven into essays published online or into such online writing environments as blogs or wikis. The book's companion website, Hermeneuti.ca, offers the example essays with both text and embedded interactive panels. The panels show results and allow readers to experiment with the toys themselves. The use of these analytical tools results in a hybrid essay: an interpretive work embedded with hermeneutical toys that can be explored for technique. The hermeneutica draw on and develop such common interactive analytics as word clouds and complex data journalism interactives. Embedded in scholarly texts, they create a more engaging argument. Moving between tool and text becomes another thread in a dynamic dialogue.

The Future of Thinking
The Future of Thinking

Author: Peter Washington *Ga*

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-08-12

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1134906889

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Learning to think is a complex process made up of reading, writing listening, speaking and remembering textual materials. The aim of this topical book is to encourage practical educational reform in the Humanities by taking the emphasis away from the reception of texts to their production. Adapting rhetorical teaching methods, the authors encourage students to participate in the activities of thinking giving them short written and verbal exercises to develop conceptual competences and linguistics skills. It is argued that these methods can be implemented successfully across a wide number of humanities subjects and that they encourage the development of practical transferable skills, both cognitive and linguistic. The authors have used these methods successfully in class, and the book includes sample exercises, the initial results, and feedback from their students.

The Retrieval of the Beautiful
The Retrieval of the Beautiful

Author: Galen A. Johnson

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2009-12-31

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0810125641

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In this elegant new study Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful. In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being. Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson’s book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin’s Balzac, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent.

Philosophy in Education
Philosophy in Education

Author: Jana Mohr Lone

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-02-11

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1442234792

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Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialog in K-12 Classrooms is a textbook in the fields of pre-college philosophy and philosophy of education, intended for philosophers and philosophy students, K-12 classroom teachers, administrators and educators, policymakers, and pre-college practitioners of all kinds. The book offers a wealth of practical resources for use in elementary, middle school, and high school classrooms, as well as consideration of many of the broader educational, social, and political topics in the field, including the educational value of pre-college philosophy, the philosophies of education that inform this philosophical practice, and the relevance of pre-college philosophy for pressing issues in contemporary education (such as education reform, child development, and prejudice and privilege in classrooms). The book includes sections on: the expansion of philosophy beyond higher education to pre-college populations; the importance of wondering, questioning and reflection in K-12 education; the ways that philosophy is uniquely suited to help students cultivate critical reasoning and independent thinking capacities; how to develop classroom communities of philosophical inquiry and their potentially transformative impact on students; the cultivation of philosophical sensitivity and positive identity formation in childhood; strategies for recognizing and diminishing the impact of social inequalities in classrooms; and the relationship between introducing philosophy in schools and education reform.

Defining the Humanities
Defining the Humanities

Author: Robert E. Proctor

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1998-12-22

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780253212191

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"Think of this as 'The Thinking Man's Bloom' or 'The Thinking Woman's Closing of the American Mind.' It takes up debates about education and reasons about them, where Bloom often only blasted away. . . . This is one of the more helpful recent statements of the case for the classics, accompanied by rather venturesome curricular suggestions." —Christian Century "His exciting readable book calls for a return to a study of the classics—and of the Renaissance poets and scholars, like Petrarch, who rediscovered the classics." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World " . . . a splendid statement bringing together in a careful and coherent way the prospects for a solid humanities curriculum." —Ernest L. Boyer Ten years ago when this book was first published it was called Education's Great Amnesia: Reconsidering the Humanities from Petrarch to Freud. It is being reissued now in a second edition with a different title for a new generation of readers who cannot have forgotten what they never knew. What are the humanities? Can we agree on a core curriculum of humanistic studies? Robert Proctor answers these questions in a provocative, readable book.

The Age of Global Dialogue
The Age of Global Dialogue

Author: Leonard J. Swidler

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2016-11-08

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1498208681

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Thinking beyond the absolutes Christians and other religious persons increasingly find "deabsolutized" in our modern thought world, Swidler reflects on the ways we humans think about the world and its meaning now that increasingly we notice that there are other ways of understanding the world than the way we grew up in. In this new situation we need to develop a common language we can use together both to appreciate our neighbors and enrich ourselves, what the author calls Ecumenical Esperanto, because it should serve as a common language without replacing any of the living languages of our religious and ideological traditions. Of course, such thinking anew about the world and its meaning must necessarily mean thinking anew about all of our religious beliefs--but this time, in dialogue.