Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry
Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgments. Yet, despite the important role intuitions play in philosophy, there has been little reflection on fundamental questions concerning the sort of data intuitions provide, how they are supposed to lead us to the truth, and why we should treat them as important. In addition, recent psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical inquiry. Rethinking Intuition brings together a distinguished group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these important issues. Students and scholars in both fields will find this book to be of great value.
Philosophy: Free Courses
Get 55 free Philosophy courses from the world’s leading universities. You can start with one of several introductory courses. The courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web. You can download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player.
Graphing the history of Philosophy
Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. The node and text are sized according to the number of connections (both in and out). The algorithm that visualises the graph also tends to put the better connected nodes in the centre of the diagram so we see the most influential philosophers, in large text, clustered in the centre. It all seems about right with the major figures in the western philosophical tradition taking the centre stage. A shortcoming however is that this evaluation only takes into account direct lines of influence. Indirect influence via another person in the network does not enter into it. This probably explains why Descartes is smaller than you’d think. It would also be better if the nodes were sized only by the number of outward connections although I think overall the differences would be slight. I’ll get round to that.
Thinking Through Thucydides
The ancient Greek historian Thucydides famously claimed that his work would be ‘a possession for all time’: not just the history of a single war between the Athenians and the Spartans, but a guide to the way that the world works, and especially to politics and war. He was right. Over the last two hundred years, Thucydides has been one of the most frequently quoted ancient writers. His ideas have influenced historians, politicians, international relations experts and soldiers; all agree that his work is useful and important.
Thucydides does not offer simple lessons, but a training course in analysis and deliberation. He demands that his readers follow his narrative of events and think about how things could have turned out differently; he asks them to listen to opposing arguments and to weigh up the issues – and then to think about how those arguments relate what actually happened. He shows how the world is complicated – and how we can make sense of that complexity. In brief, he aims to help his readers to develop the skills that every citizen of a democracy needs.
The Notion of Creativity Revisited – A Philosophical Perspective on Creativity Research
This article is a critical, yet constructive, review of some recent attempts to define and understand creativity, informed by the methods and debates of contemporary philosophy. I argue that the definitional project is not essential to creativity research, but important nevertheless. The standard definition of creativity as the production of something that is both novel and appropriate is on the right track, but needs further qualification and tends to be elaborated in ways that make it either too narrow or too broad. I argue that the product, and not the person or process, should be viewed as the primary bearer of creativity and criticize some influential theorists for making creativity too strongly dependent on social acceptance, while also recognizing that the realist alternative tends to widen, and thus threatens to trivialize, the central notion of an appropriate product. The notion of response-dependence might be of some help to find the proper balance between the two extremes, and some comparisons with evolutionary theory also help to shed further light on the problem. Finally, I try to spell out the practical consequences of my investigation for creativity research.
It is not the concrete creative processes that are mysterious or elusive; it is the very notion of creativity that remains inherently paradoxical. There is something irremediably strange about the idea of simultaneously transgressing the norms while still acting appropriately. It is akin to some of the deep philosophical paradoxes such as, for example, the paradox of freedom, a notion that seems to require of an action that it should neither be a product of necessity nor simply of chance, or the learning paradox raised in Plato’s Meno: Human beings cannot search either for what they know (for, in that case, they would have it already) or what they do not know (for, in that case, they would not even know what to search for).
Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry
Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgments. Yet, despite the important role intuitions play in philosophy, there has been little reflection on fundamental questions concerning the sort of data intuitions provide, how they are supposed to lead us to the truth, and why we should treat them as important. In addition, recent psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical inquiry. Rethinking Intuition brings together a distinguished group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these important issues. Students and scholars in both fields will find this book to be of great value.
Modes of Governance in Neo-Liberal Capitalism
This Rhizomes special issue on “Neo-liberal Governmentality: Technologies of the Self & Governmental Conduct” is intended to contribute to the scholarly debate over neo-liberalism under contemporary conditions of globalization. It asks: How are liberal and neo-liberal logics of governance developed on the basis of governmental discourses that address the lived experiences of ordinary people, industrial masses, subalterns, minorities, and other marginalized populations? How are neo-liberal subjects constructed in multiple ways? And what are some of the conditions under which neo-liberal capitalism becomes a dominant trend in this new century? In addressing these questions, we organize the articles according to three themes: liberal logic and governmental discourses, construction of neo-liberal subjects, and conditions of neo-liberal capitalism.
Life Changing – A Philosophical Guide
Timothy Rayner – Life Changing marks the end of a personal journey. For the past fifteen years, I have been studying, teaching, and applying transformative philosophy in my own life, first as a doctoral student at the University of Sydney, then as a lecturer at the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales, and more recently in my Philosophy for Change course, which I’ve run at the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sydney. My guiding intuition throughout has been that it is possible to distil from philosophical ideas a kernel of practical wisdom, and that this practical wisdom can be communicated through simple exercises that students can apply to their own lives.
This intuition is core to Life Changing. The book is structured about five practical exercises. Each incorporates a life-changing insight. The exercises show you how to muster the courage to change; how to control yourself like a Stoic philosopher; how to cultivate your Nietzschean will to power; and how to use Spinoza’s philosophy to supercharge your social life. They show you how to take adventure from the heart of crisis and fulfilment from the struggle with adversity.
