Intellectual Habits Research Articles

Art-Engaged Theology: Confronting Silence

As engagement with art is increasingly recognized as an exciting and accepted practice in theology, theologians are faced with questions concerning the purposes of such engagement and how best to undertake it. This article argues that engagement with art is not merely the purview of an esoteric subdiscipline known as “Theology and the Arts” but offers an opportunity for theologians to confront the humanity at the heart of their own work, including guilt, error, and corruption, which will enable progress toward the goal of greater intimacy and belonging. Taking seriously the idea that both our theological concepts and our intellectual habits have been shaped by social and material realities, this article asks how we ought to think about theological engagement with art given that we are prone to colonizing habits of thought that affect such engagement. By putting theologians including Willie Jennings and Emilie Townes in conversation with theories about art from T.J. Clark, Alva Noe, and James A. Noel, we ask how theologians might resist temptations to categorize art as theology's other or absorb it into its own concerns, both of which reflect colonizing habits of mind and inure theology against a genuine confrontation with art. We recommend a posture of silence, responsive to the silence of the painting itself, in which the theologian opens to self-reflexive questions about both the operations of their own imagination, creativity, imagery, silence, and more, as well as the implications for the theological concepts used to designate those realities.

Fostering Virtue-Driven Information Literacy

This conversation group emerged from the discussions of the Roundtable for Virtue-Driven Information Literacy (VIL) formed in 2022. The presenters defined VIL, emphasizing intellectual virtues and the cultivation of virtuous intellectual habits in the pursuit of truth and the potential benefits of VIL as a foundation for information literacy in academic libraries. Participants identified the value of VIL in providing a theoretical framework for information-literacy instruction, motivating students, and connecting library initiatives with faith-based worldviews. Breakout groups also discussed the practical challenges associated with VIL implementation. The presenters concluded with suggestions for resources and an invitation for collaboration among librarians.

Scholarly reading (and writing) and the power of impact factors: a study of distributed cognition and intellectual habits.

Using observational interviews and introducing theories of embodied and distributed cognition, this study examines the scholarly reading and the intellectual habits of a group of social scientists. All participants were working at universities in task environments dominated by digital artifacts and technologies. The study found a strong connection between scholarly reading and the scholars' writing processes and a further coupling to their digital publishing activity. While examining the participants' print and online reading, it turned out that their reading was so tightly coupled to their writing that this entanglement had to be at the core of the analysis. In the study, scholarly reading and writing are analyzed as cognitive processes that extend beyond the brain and body and comprise cognitive artifacts of texts and their material bearers, such as printouts, digital displays, computers, and the Internet. In the process of creating text-or reading and writing-brains, bodies, and artifacts are considered to be dynamically coupled in a distributed cognitive process. Based on interviews with a sample of academics, the study analyses how their scholarly reading relates to the other elements in such an extended process and how they utilize the affordances of cognitive digital artifacts in their creative and intellectual endeavors.

Locke's Ethics of Virtuous Thinking

Locke is generally taken as promoting an ethics of belief. For him, we must apply a doxastic norm so that we properly conduct our understanding. Thus, he forcefully highlights one key epistemic norm, the norm of evidence, that prescribes that we adjust the strength of our assent to the available evidence. I shall argue that Of the Conduct of the Understanding constitutes the framework within which Locke’s remarks in the Essay must be inserted. Far from promoting a mere ethics of belief, Locke actually promotes a virtue epistemology, or an ethics of virtuous thinking. Contrary to doxastic anti-voluntarism, this new way of apprehending Locke’s remarks does not downplay the role of the will. But compared to doxastic voluntarism, it gives its due role to the will (it is not devoted to the control of our assent, but to the ordering the consideration of an idea, or the forbearing to consider it, which is at the bottom of the acquisition of intellectual habits). Moreover, it takes into account important aspects of our intellectual life, namely diachronic and social aspects.

Discursos y ensayos sobre estudios universitarios by John Henry Cardinal Newman

Reviewed by: Discursos y ensayos sobre estudios universitarios by John Henry Cardinal Newman Pablo Blanco-Sarto Discursos y ensayos sobre estudios universitarios JOHN HENRY CARDINAL NEWMAN, TRANSLATION AND INTRODUCTION BY PAULA JULLIAN AND ANA MARÍA NEIRA Santiago de Chile: Ediciones UC, 2021. 176 pages. E-book: $20,000.00 COP, $12 USD. ISBN: 9789561427501. The detailed historical and biographical editorial introduction focuses on the figure of John Henry Newman as an educator. It contextualizes the university text with the educational initiatives of the English saint, especially those in Birmingham. In The Idea of a University, Newman speaks of the relationship of the humanities not only with the arts but also with the sciences, especially physics and medicine. The Newmanian adventure in the Catholic University of Ireland aimed to overcome the dominant empiricism and pragmatism of the day, for which he proposed the study of the classics. It thus sought the integral education of the students, which was thought to transcend the education of a mere gentleman, and thus he proposed a liberal education. The editors insist on the idea of the university as sets of knowledge that constitute an organic whole, and so, the introduction focuses on the unity of knowledge, as it occurs in creation, despite the limitations of human intelligence that tend to fragment reality in order to know it in its totality. Newman witnessed the exclusion of theology from the universities, and so he insisted that it should be included in the university curriculum; otherwise, there remained a vacuum of knowledge that could only be filled by philosophy and theology. For this reason, the editors explain the necessary depth of knowledge and the importance of knowledge for its own sake. The absence of the love of knowledge [End Page 105] for its own sake, the editors argue, make the university disappear, turning it into a mere center for the dispensation of degrees. In Discursos y ensayos sobre estudios universitarios Newman alludes to the loss of the unitary dimension of knowledge, which leads to an impoverished fragmentation of knowledge. By leaving theology and philosophy out of the university, the understanding of reality was left without causes or ends, and so it was divided and impoverished. Including theology and philosophy in the overall university curriculum prevented the risk of partiality and many forms of reductionism. On the one hand, there was an excessive prominence given to science to the detriment of other fields, commonly known today as the arts and humanities. There was a risk of indiscriminate growth of one discipline in a unilateral way, which was an important issue when it came to the study of the human being. This vision of the unity was beautifully captured in this quote from the speech “Bearing of Theology on other Knowledge.” The second major theme discussed in the introduction is liberal education, which is found in the first part of Newman’s work, but in fact runs through all the texts of the book. Starting from a Socratic origin and medieval developments, Newman seeks to train the intellect of the student to form him for life. At the same time, for Newman liberal education was not limited to the learning of certain contents of a particular curriculum, as it had been in the medieval university, as well as the nineteenth-century university. Rather, Newman sought to develop the habit of autonomous thinking, or what he called the “culture of the intellect.” This educational proposal applied to students in all schools and faculties of the university, since this intellectual habit was good for the mind, providing it with the necessary skills to seek the good and the truth. Liberality thus referred to not seeking an immediate reward, but seeing the value of knowledge as such, as an end in itself. There is justification for this new translation into Spanish, despite the fact that Eunsa (Pamplona, 2011) and Encuentro (Madrid, 2014) have already published translations. The present edition is a selection of passages that includes speeches about letters and sciences, which were chosen deliberately. In addition, a summary of the most relevant ideas of each chapter is included, and the text has been edited in a way that only content relevant...

Masters of the Manuscript, Makers of Knowledge: Colonial New England Students and their Shorthand Notes

Abstract By failing to keep up with the praxeological turn of early modern Europeanists in the 1980s, scholarship on colonial America has consistently discounted the historical student. Uninterested in examining the intellectual habits of colonial students, early American historians have had little to say about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century schools beyond rehearsing worn, and often demonstrably false platitudes. This article seeks to take colonial students seriously by examining one of their most common, yet little studied intellectual practices: shorthand. When we apply the focus on intellectual praxis to modest subjects, when we look across boundaries of space and time, placing colonial America back into the fold of early modern history, a different image of the historical student snaps into focus. Rather than negligible rote memorizers, colonial students become active and engaged learners who sought to propagate the latest scribal technologies of their times.

Studying argumentation and education in South America: what has been advanced and what lies ahead

ABSTRACT With this paper, we aim to present what has been developed so far in the field of argumentation and education in South America to the best of our knowledge. However, we also aim to anticipate new trends that will arise from the challenges South American democracies face right now, and the role of collective reasoned discussion in tackling them. Traditionally argumentation studies have been proposed within three broad areas of research and practice. First, argue to learn, as the uses of argumentation practices to develop conceptual knowledge in different domains of education. Second, learn to argue by promoting argumentative practices to develop argumentative and thinking skills. Third, teacher professional development enables teachers to enact argumentation in their classrooms. From this scenario, we argue that three interrelated branches of research are the future ahead of us: studies of argumentation and citizen education using deliberative practices, cultivating virtuous intellectual habits, and the rise of deliberative teaching focused on collaborative settings designed to empower democratic values (diversity, equality, and participation). We conclude by stating that South America has helped the advancement of argumentation theory, but we still have a road ahead in developing more spaces for democratic participation.

Algorithmic Surveillance and the Political Life of Error

Concerns with errors, mistakes, and inaccuracies have shaped political debates about what technologies do, where and how certain technologies can be used, and for which purposes. However, error has received scant attention in the emerging field of ignorance studies. In this article, we analyze how errors have been mobilized in scientific and public controversies over surveillance technologies. In juxtaposing nineteenth-century debates about the errors of biometric technologies for policing and surveillance to current criticisms of facial recognition systems, we trace a transformation of error and its political life. We argue that the modern preoccupation with error and the intellectual habits inculcated to eliminate or tame it have been transformed with machine learning. Machine learning algorithms do not eliminate or tame error, but they optimize it. Therefore, despite reports by digital rights activists, civil liberties organizations, and academics highlighting algorithmic bias and error, facial recognition systems have continued to be rolled out. Drawing on a landmark legal case around facial recognition in the UK, we show how optimizing error also remakes the conditions for a critique of surveillance. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Ignorance,” edited by Lukas M. Verburgt and Peter Burke.

Interpreting Bergson: rubbing up against the grain of our intellectual habits

Interpreting Bergson: rubbing up against the grain of our intellectual habits

Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation by Andrew Kraebel

Reviewed by: Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation by Andrew Kraebel Daniel Sawyer Andrew Kraebel. Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 302. $99.99 cloth. Andrew Kraebel has written a major study examining the treatment of the Bible in fourteenth-century England. This book explores a landscape of biblical commentary and translation that, it cogently argues, was more intellectually fruitful and less divided than has sometimes been thought. In particular, the argument (re)integrates academic commentary and “extramural” writings, including vernacular texts. It also explores how the biblical commentaries produced by Wyclif and by his followers fitted into and emerged from their intellectual context, rather than standing wholly at odds with it. The book is a diptych: the first two chapters examine biblical commentary within the university, and the following two graduate to considerations of commentary beyond the university and, sometimes, the returning influence of such extra-academic materials on scholars. [End Page 311] Chapter 1 begins with the observation that the history of western European biblical interpretation in these centuries has tended to revolve around large, overarching approaches, prescriptions for all of the Bible. Tracking the progress or regress of such totalizing approaches, Kraebel argues, does not capture the more ground-level reality of surviving commentaries on specific books. Seeking such granular evidence, the chapter explores commentaries specific to the Psalter from three thinkers, Henry Cossey, Nicholas Trevet, and Thomas Waleys. The argument observes how the special nature of this intellectually and culturally central biblical book proved a challenge for overarching hermeneutic theories; how Cossey, Trevet, and Waleys registered this challenge; and how their commentaries show these writers themselves weighing up the sometimes discordant priorities of past Psalter-specific expositions against total interpretative theories. In closing the chapter, Kraebel underlines the value, in present-day research, of studying book-specific traditions of biblical commentary diachronically: we need to know the book-specific lineages influencing a commentator to assess that commentator’s response to broader, totalizing interpretative theories (51–52). Staying within academia but traveling later in the century, the second chapter turns to what survives of Wyclif’s postils on the whole Bible, attending to his postil on the Psalter as a useful test-case, and then comparing that to his work on Matthew. Kraebel finds a previously underappreciated “hermeneutic eclecticism” in the postils (57), which draw, like those of Wyclif’s Oxford predecessors, on a diverse array of book-specific commentaries for both ideas and methods. He also offers a short but important set of new findings about Wyclif’s adoption and adaptation, in work on the Psalter, of the cross-referencing system of the twelfth-century Media glosatura of Gilbert of Poitiers (61–62). This discussion and its supporting evidence in the book’s first appendix (188–91) should interest anyone working on information history. Having characterized Wyclif in his postils as a writer mixing hermeneutics and juggling biblical senses, the argument compares the unfinished postil on Matthew written by Wyclif’s contemporary, William Woodford. Though the two differed in style and on points of substance, both, Kraebel argues, eclectically selected approaches according to the needs of the textual moment; both, he also suggests, wrote in the shadow of Nicholas of Lyra, with commentary traditions as yet unable fully to absorb and accommodate Nicholas’s literalism. Kraebel shows here the dividends to be gathered by exploring the thought of apparent opponents for shared intellectual habits. [End Page 312] Chapter 3 brings us to Richard Rolle. Kraebel presents Rolle’s Latin Psalter as a text rendering academic insights into a format devotionally workable for clerics with limited exposure to scholarly commentary and community. He also proposes that Rolle revised this text (103). The second appendix substantiates this idea through preliminary study of the text’s two versions, across fifteen copies, including all known insular witnesses. The appendix shows that the second version was produced through sensitive revision by someone with access to a good copy of the first version, probably working in Yorkshire; that is, that the second version could very well be Rolle...

Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

<i>Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self</i>. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

Using peer feedback to help develop critical thinking skills

Many first year undergraduate students arrive at university without having been taught how to think critically. This poses a serious problem as without critical thinking skills, students can fall into bad intellectual habits impeding their development. An example of this is the over-reliance on the internet for information. The resulting ‘Google-it’ mentality can then leave sixth-formers insufficiently prepared for Higher Education; impacting their ability to thrive at university.

Diversity in and among Rhetorical Traditions

Diversity in and among Rhetorical Traditions

Have new map, will travel?

Harriet Bulkeley identifies a persistent, and misconceived, framing of climate change as a ‘society–nature problem’ (Bulkeley H (2019). Navigating climate's human geographies: exploring the whereabouts of climate politics. Dialogues in Human Geography 9(1): 3–17). While I concur with her diagnosis, her implied cure begins with geographers volunteering to change their intellectual habits by responding to ‘good arguments’. I challenge this cognitivism and ask what sorts of material frameworks for inquiry will engender an embrace of the idea of ‘climate as condition’.

Aristotelian phronesis as a key factor for leadership in the knowledge-creating company according to Ikujiro Nonaka

Some Western organizational studies scholars have proposed that Aristotelian Phronesisrepresents a way of including practical reason in research on business topics such as decision-making, knowledge management, ethics and leadership. Ikujiro Nonaka, a Japanese scholar with notable theoretical and practical contributions to knowledge creation in organizations and with extensive experience in Japanese corporations, has joined this group of academics. As an Eastern thinker, he takes on a Western classical tradition, namely the virtue of Phronesis, making an important contribution to the application of ethical notions to business practice, in this case knowledge management. To locate his conceptualization of Aristotelian practical wisdom, we briefly describe his theory of knowledge creation, pointing to phroneticleadership skills as essential drivers of knowledge creation in organizations. Furthermore, we assess Nonaka’s incorporation of practical rationality from the point of view of the Western classical tradition.To conclude, we discuss the scope and limits of the use of Phronesisin Nonaka´s contribution, and ultimately suggest that incorporating the will helps us to understand prudence as a virtue and not just as an intellectual habit.

Human, Society and Education in E. Durkheim’s Thoughts

뒤르껭의 사상은 사회학의 통상적 범위를 넘어서 인간본성에 관한 철학적 탐구로부터 시작된다. 인간본성의 이중성, 즉 감각과 이성의 안티노미를 규명하고자 하는 문제의식으로부터 출발하여 뒤르껭은 기존의 철학을 대치하는 새로운 사회학적 해답을 제시한다. 그가 보기에 사회는 인간본성의 한 축을 이루면서 인간다운 삶의 절대적 기준의 역할을 한다. 뒤르껭의 사회는 단순한 실증주의적 관점으로는 이해될 수 없는 선험적 측면을 가진다. 집단적 의식의 의미에 비추어 볼 때, 사회는 개인을 초월하는 절대적 기준이면서도 개인의 내면과 분리불가능한 표상이다. 이 점에서 뒤르껭과 칸트의 거리는 그다지 멀다고 할 수 없다. 즉, 뒤르껭의 사회의 개념은 이데아나 실재를 가정하는 형이상학적 관점과 충분히 양립할 수 있다. 또한 뒤르껭의 사회는 사회화의 동태적 과정, 즉 교육을 통하여 역동적으로 형성되는 인간의 실천행위의 총합에 해당한다. 이 점에 주목할 때, 뒤르껭은 칸트의 선험적 이념이 가지는 추상성을 살아있는 인간의 실천성을 강조함으로써 극복한다고 볼 수 있다. 특히 사회화의 중요한 기제로서 습관에 관한 뒤르껭의 강조는 현대의 아동 중심의 교육관과는 달리, 교육의 가치는 개인 그 너머에 있다는 사실을 교육의 과정에서 구체적으로 확인하도록 만들어준다. 다만, 뒤르껭은 경험적 법칙을 발견하는 것을 사회학자로서 자신의 제1의 임무로 생각하였으며, 사회과학적 연구를 통하여 인간에 관한 가장 정확한 이해가 가능하다고 보았다.This paper deals with the question how Durkheim proposes the problem of antinomy in human nature and solves it by sociological perspective. His approach differs from Kant’s transcendent philosophy as well as the empirical monism and the idealist monism. For him, society is indeed the superior aspect of human nature, only by which individual can cultivate all their valuable capacities in moral, intellectual, religious realms. Criticizing the abstract idea of individual separated from concrete realities, Durkheim concludes that the socializing process itself provides both the cause of human antinomy and the answer to overcome it. Despite of the apparent repute of Durkheim to any transcendant idea, his concept of society seems to have somehow similar attributes with it, in the sense that collective consciousness puts itself as the absolute standard governing the whole individual minds. Furthermore, unlike Kant, Durkheim’s society can provide empirical foundation with the metaphysical concept of reality, because his society embraces all kind of human practices, thoughts, beliefs and norms throughout the history. Besides, according to him, the place of habit in moral education is emphasized to internalize the collective consciousness, while modern trend of child centered education overlooks its importance. Even in learning subjects at school, the intellectual habit plays its distinctive role.

Sindéresis y conciencia moral

Man's cognoscitive acts study can improve a better understanding of intellectual habits. The sinderesys and conciensce notions are, in this way, notoriously lightened.

El hábito de sabiduría según Leonardo Polo

In this paper it is studied the habit of wisdom according to Leonardo Polo; intellectual habit that is innate, superior to the others, solidary to the personal intellect, to whom attains as to known at the level of the act of human being, and to the others personal transcendentals.

Václav Havel by Kieran Williams (review)

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 790 rewarding participation. Despite these mechanisms, which reduced historywriting to the mere accomplishment of sophisticated propaganda in a scholarly form in a general context of de-professionalization of the discipline, educated historians participated, alongside Party activists and veterans untrained in history, in the struggle for resources, positions and privilege’ (pp. 337–38). That said, Romanian historiography under Ceaușescu was not entirely subservient to the dictates of the Party. One has only to read the contributions of respected historians in Revue Roumaine d’Histoire and Revista de Istorie to find support for such a view. UCL SSEES and Georgetown University, Dennis Deletant Washington D.C. Williams, Kieran. Václav Havel. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books, London, 2016. 237 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £11.99 (paperback). Williams’s biography of Václav Havel is less a conventional narrative of his life and influence, though it does touch on all the key moments, than a search for the deeper forces which gave rise to his thought and actions. Williams sees Havel as a figure who was always consumed by a poetic instinct to unsettle and disturb, to continually force others to step outside of their ordinary routines. The analysis relies on Williams’s deep immersion in Havel’s writing — not just the standard essays and plays but also his earliest poetry, multiple drafts of all his works, and the writings of his main influences. Though its informational density may be overwhelming to casual readers or those not familiar with the history of the region, it will be that much more rewarding to students of Havel’s art, philosophy and politics, especially ones not fluent in Czech, who will find much needed context and a number of original interpretations. Williams begins with the fact that biography was a problem for Havel. As the son of a wealthy and well-known family, he was the object of envy and some isolation in his youth. This same background then made him a class enemy for the Communists and limited his formal education. His dissident activities, however, also became the source of his moral authority. And by the end of his life he was an icon, whose reputation was so great that it became an impediment to communication. Much of the interest in the work comes from Williams’s excavation of the roots of Havel’s thought in family traditions — a preference for harmony and the moral improvement of public life — rivalries with an older generation that included Milan Kundera and the screenwriter Jaroslav Dietl, and early encounters with philosophy. He finds the main key to Havel’s thought in the REVIEWS 791 work of the Czech thinker Josef Šafařík who argued that each individual was morally bound to avouch a personal truth. The effect of Havel’s personality on his politics and art are a constant underlying theme in the text. These character traits include his desire to embrace life in all its forms, his optimism and ability to see the good in even forced experiences like the army and prison (which Williams cleverly terms ‘a sabbatical from the nerve-wracking life of dissent’), and his inclination to legalistic thinking (an inspiration for the strategy of Charta 77). Two more intellectual habits of mind were his belief that small actions could have wideranging consequences and his constant worry about how consumerism and technology estrange people from real being. Along the way Williams takes issue with some misconceptions about Havel’s political thought. He argues that Havel was not opposed to political parties as some have contended and in fact thought them essential both in 1968 and after the revolution. He similarly says that Havel was not against economic reforms and instead believed that the architect of the Czech reforms, Václav Klaus, was creating a ‘big-state conservatism’. The problem in both cases may have been that Havel’s arguments were too subtle and nuanced for easy consumption, a tendency he parodied in the title of his memoir (its Czech title is Please Be Brief, a request he often received from journalists). An interesting question about Havel is the extent to which he is a distinctively Czech thinker...

Real-World Engagement with Controversial Issues in History and Social Studies: Teaching for Transformative Experiences and Conceptual Change.

Controversial issues have been established within the larger framework of civic education as an effective pedagogical approach to developing critical thinking in the classroom, preparing students with intellectual habits necessary for participation in scholarship, civic life and democracy. In this study, we found that a pedagogical intervention, Teaching for Transformative Experience in History, in some cases led to significantly higher engagement with political concepts beyond the classroom, and in other cases, the intervention led to significantly improved conceptual change. The study addresses some of the challenges presented by the research on civic education, providing a potential framework for developing pedagogical practice in history and social studies education that grounds a participatory, meaning-making process in curriculum design and assessment framed by controversial issues.