Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,[5][6] cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years.[7] Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics"[8][9][10] and a major figure of analytic philosophy.[5] His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.[11][12]
Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy[13] and contemporary capitalism,[14] and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure.[15] His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

In 2010, Chomsky received the Erich Fromm Prize in Stuttgart, Germany.

Analytic vs. Continental

Heuristic ( /hjʉˈrɪstɨk/; or heuristics; Greek: "Εὑρίσκω", "find" or "discover") refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Where an exhaustive search is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, or common sense.
In more precise terms, heuristics are strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines.

Reid Hoffman dreamed of becoming a philosopher. After Stanford, he took a Marshall scholarship so he could ponder the great ideas at Oxford. “What I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture,” the 44-year-old LinkedIn cofounder reflects over lunch during one of his regular trips back to the UK. “I’d write books and essays to help us figure out who we all should be.” Within months of starting his term, though, Hoffman concluded that spending decades answering a single philosophical question might not have sufficient impact on the world. “Academia wasn’t the right platform,” he says. “It didn’t have enough scale. So I decided I would be a software entrepreneur instead.”

Thiel calls Hoffman the firm’s “most rigorous strategic thinker,” who used his empathetic nature to defuse potential conflicts. “I don’t know what’s the opposite of a sociopath, but that’s what Reid is,” Thiel says. “The anti-sociopath understands other people incredibly well and tries to craft solutions that work for them.”

All LinkedIn needs to do now is enlighten its users to the full power of the platform. “Ask the average person,” Hoffman says with frustration. “They think it’s a place they keep their CV online and maybe have some connections with people they know professionally. They don’t think of it as a place to get business intelligence, to research problems, to establish an online presence where other people in the network can find them. It’s as if we’re a screwdriver in a world where people don’t quite understand screws. If Americans really learned how to use LinkedIn, it would raise the country’s GDP.” It’s a massive claim, but you get the sense that the “intellectual entrepreneur”—as Elon Musk calls Hoffman—really means it. Joi Ito says, “He looks at the world and society as a huge game, an intellectual exercise where he’s trying to optimize for the common good.” Two decades after his stint at Oxford, the big thinker still lives in a world of ideas—but on the mammoth scale he craved and with a bit better compensation. (Hoffman’s net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $1.5 billion.)

Reification (also known as concretism, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity.[1] In other words, it is the error of treating as a concrete thing something which is not concrete, but merely an idea. For example: if the phrase "fighting for justice" is taken literally, justice would be reified.

Elenchus (Ancient Greek: ἔλεγχος elengkhos "argument of disproof or refutation; cross-examining, testing, scrutiny esp. for purposes of refutation"[3]) is the central technique of the Socratic method. The Latin form elenchus (plural elenchi ) is used in English as the technical philosophical term.[4]

The retreat might have been a significant event in the history of ideas. It could mark the beginning of a discourse on ethics and spiritual experience that is as unconstrained by dogma and cultural prejudice as the discourses of physics, biology, and chemistry are. Other retreats for scientists are now being planned. What effect this will have on our collective understanding of the human mind remains to be seen. But we could be witnessing the birth of a contemplative science.

Philosophy was always supposed to be as much about engaging in open conversation as about constructing grand unifying theories of everything. The internet, because of its inherently democratic bias towards brevity, concision and accessibility, may well be cultivating a minor revolution in the way we think about philosophy, and who gets to talk about it. This, surely, can only be a good thing.

Transcript: http://dotsub.com/view/7f7af95f-88fe-4b64-aefb-812011c2af00/viewTranscript/eng

Described by a SJC graduate as "Great Books on crack"

www.fourhourworkweek.com

That doesn’t mean we must approve of every possible extension of the mind, and even good extensions will have some drawbacks. Socrates worried that writing would make people forgetful and unwise. Sure enough, writing did rob us of some gifts, such as the ability to recite epic poems like The Iliad from memory. But it also created a much larger pool of knowledge from which people could draw, a pool that has continued to expand (or, dare we say, continued to extend?).
If we’ve learned anything since Clark and Chalmers published “The Extended Mind,” it’s not to underestimate the mind’s ability to adapt to the changing world.

PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophy articles and books by academic philosophers. We monitor journals in many areas of philosophy, as well as archives and personal pages. We also accept articles directly from users, who can provide links or upload copies. Some features require that you sign in first, but creating an account is easy and free.

The truth, according to Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, is that there is almost no evidence that homework helps elementary school students achieve academic success and little more that it helps older students. Yet the nightly burden is taking a serious toll on America's families. It robs children of the sleep, play, and exercise time they need for proper physical, emotional, and neurological development. And it is a hidden cause of the childhood obesity epidemic, creating a nation of "homework potatoes."