I read Intuition Pumps And Other Tools For Thinking by Daniel Dennett.  In the book, he describes and illustrates many tools for doing philosophy and thinking in general.  He provides some general strategies like using labels, using examples, developing analogies and metaphors, staging (arranging a sturdy perch from which to attack different parts of a problem), and presenting intuition pumps.  Then, in many short chapters (an excellent strategy), he presents scenarios which illustrate thinking tools in the contexts of understanding meaning in general, evolution, consciousness, and free will.  You are quite likely to emerge from a reading of this book as a sharper thinker.  I got a better idea of how the idea of zombies is used in the theorizing about consciousness, and the way in which the sorta operator explains how consciousness might be able to be built up from other processes.  How to be aware of what might be wrong with an explanation or theory can also be improved by a reading of this book.  If your job is to teach others to think more clearly, this book is a must for you.

A recently updated NEA publication identifies eight types of disruptive behavior in classrooms.  It personifies each of them by assigning a name.  The "classroom disrupters" are the Chatterbox/Clown, Limelighter, Media Maven, Refusenik, Short Fuse, Time Gobbler, Student/Friend, and Victim/Bully/Bystander.  How does the degree to which each of these student types feels anxiety relate to how they can be helped to use their classroom time effectively?  This article defines anxiety as "the brain response to danger, stimuli that an organism will actively attempt to avoid."  It is noted in the article that about one in five or six students will have an anxiety disorder of one type or another during their school years.  The rate for girls is at least double that for boys.  Here are some resources:  

Anxiety: A Very Short Introduction was written by Daniel and Jason Freeman.  They provide a good introduction to the topic.  As part of an Oxford University Press series, the book has both a US and UK perspective.  If you want to learn about or update knowledge about an area, this series is very helpful.  Some other titles are Augustine, Art Theory, Habermas, Logic, Tragedy, Landscapes and Geomorphology, Kabbalah, Conscience and Deserts.  Six anxiety disorders each get a chapter:  Phobias, Social Phobia, Panic Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-compulsive Disorder, and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.  There's a chapter on treatment ... << MORE >>

Frank M. Oppenheim wrote a book, Reverence For The Relations of Life, about Josiah Royce's interactions with Peirce, James and Dewey.  You learn a lot about these thinkers and about Pragmatism by reading the book.  There is also a strong discussion of the religious faith of these thinkers.  Here's a fun thought experiment which was suggested to me by the author's placement of the thinkers and others on an imaginary stage.  Choose a topic and design a workshop with whatever presenters you would like.  You can make it a requirement that the presenters were all alive at the ... << MORE >>

First, the answer sheet for yesterday's post on The Hedgehog and The Fox.  This blog post has explanations for the people listed by Berlin and also (what a bonus) gives opinions on whether John Lennon and Paul McCartney were/are hedgehogs or foxes.  So, that difference is whether a thinker tries to use one broad theory to explain (hedgehog) or forges many smaller explanations suited to individual situations (fox).  What other issues are there.  Lets call Zebras thinkers who look to the data, want empirical proof, and rely on their senses.  Unicorns are then thinkers who reason things out, rely on intuition, and might consider mystical explanations.  It's the tough-minded/tender-minded distinction that William James presents in his Lowell Institute Lectures and his book Pragmatism.  I'm not aware of any Greek fragment that makes the distinction, but you can't have everything.  Again, the goal in education is probably to help students to hone both of the skills, being able to draw conclusions when appropriate and gather data from the environment when needed.  Instead of this discussion,which I decided to do here, I'll next look at the Six Thinking Hats book on my Thinkers and Thinking blog.

Proust gets a lot of current notice in books like Proust was a Neuroscientist and Proust and the Squid.  For my part, I'm starting to enjoy his descriptions.  I'm reading the new Penguin Classic translations, and hope to finish them not long after the last of them gets published (actually a matter of a few years from now).  Here is a quote from the second book (pg. 327).  "Now that the Combray breed, the strain from which there once sprang people of utter integrity, like my grandmother and mother, seems all but extinct, and if one's choice among men is more or less reduced, on the one hand, to uncomplicated troglodytes, unfeeling, straightforward creatures the mere sound of whose voice tells you they have not the slightest interest in any of your concerns, and , on the other, a race of men who, while they are in your company, can sympathize with you, cherish you, be moved to tears by you, and then, a few hours later, contradict all this by making a cruel joke about you, but who can go on being charming toward you, full of understanding, still on the same footing of momentary closeness, then I am inclined to think that, of the two, I prefer men of the latter breed, if not for their human value, at least for their company."  Take that, people, English (and I suppose French) language, and sensibilities.

The learners are about to descend once again on the classrooms.  It is customary to refer in many statements about learners to either Bloom's Taxonomy or Hedgehogs and Foxes.  I hadn't ever read Isaiah Berlin's essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, so I went for it.  I have a May 1957 Mentor Book copy.  I was able to read when it came out, but I guess I was reading other things.  The Hedgehog/Fox distinction is easy to misinterpret.  Foxes are seen as clever, but that is a blind alley.  The idea is often seen as specialization vs. being a generalist, but that misses the mark, too.  The idea is that the Hedgehog interprets according to one holistic theme, while the Fox focuses on individual, smaller, areas of understanding.  Can you sort these examples that Berlin gave as to whether they were hedgehogs or foxes: Aristotle, Pascal, Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Balzac, Joyce, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Erasmus, Proust, Moliere, Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare, Herodotus, Pushkin?  It probably makes sense to teach thinkers to use both of these ways of understanding in situations in which they would be best.  Here is an interesting self-assessment of whether an educator is one or the other of these furry little thinkers.  On my Thinkers and Thinking blog I will look at another similar distinction, and see if I can implicate more small animals.

Here are a couple of morsels for those interested in the William, Henry (x2), Alice (x2) James family.  There is a Houghton Library exhibition about William James, the on-line version of which is at this location.  In the, "I guess the relationship didn't work" department, here is the description of one from Henry James, the novelist's Roderick Hudson.  The individual involved is one Madame Grandoni; "A couple of years after her first husband's death she had accepted the hand and the name of a Neapolitan music-master ten years younger than herself and with no fortune but his fiddle bow.  The union had proved a union of exasperated opposites, and the Maestro Grandoni was suspected of using the fiddle-bow as an instrument of conjugal correction. He had finally run off with a prima donna assoluta, who, it was commonly hoped, had given him a taste of the quality implied in her title.  He was believed to be living still, but he had shrunk to a small black spot in Madame Grandoni's life, and for ten years she had not mentioned his name."  In other words, it didn't work out.

Check out my Goodreads bookshelf for 5000 books in the areas of psychology, philosophy and education.  link to Goodreads shelf  I just got Volumes II and III of the Klopfer set on the Rorschach test.  I got Volume I in 1973 or so... better late than never. Volume II was a Contemporary Psychology review copy.  Then it was at the library of The Forest Institute of Professional Psychology.  Volume III has an appreciation of Bruno Klopfer by Marguerite Hertz.  I recently saw a student reading Tom Sawyer.  It's interesting how rarely you see a student reading a "classic" (and I ask what a student is reading pretty often!).  Here's an interesting approach to publishing; whether the book will be published depends on how many people buy it in advance.  Finally, a plug for my book - just 99 cents on Kindle.  If you happen to be in Italy, you can get it for only EUR 0,89.  Isn't the internet great?  Keep on reading (but not this, because it is finished).

I'll admit that until this week, I would have had trouble distinguishing these two men.  I'm going to give you the short course.  What they have in common is that they were both healers in the humanistic/existential mold.  They both taught/worked at the W.A. White Institute and at the New School for Social Research.  They both had tuberculosis during their lives.  Rollo May wrote The Art of Counseling and Love and Will.  Erich Fromm wrote The Art of Loving and Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism.  Now for what was different about them.  May was born in Ohio, worked in Greece, and was associated with Saybrook Graduate School.  He lived in the San Francisco Bay area when he was older and died in 1994.  Fromm, on the other hand, was born in Germany, worked in Mexico, and was associated with Bennington College.  He lived in Switzerland when older, and died earlier than May, in 1980.  You can get an impression of each of them by watching a video on YouTube.