Intellect: Mind Over Matter, by Mortimer J. Adler
A most prevalent myth in our time says that we think with our brains. The truth is rather, we do not think with our brains, but we do not think without them.
In Intellect: Mind Over Matter, Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, in his exceptionally clear and easy to read style, clarifies and answers many questions about the mind. He “argues that in conflict between ancient and modern approaches to the study of mind key insights have been lost that bear on contemporary psychology. According to Adler, the intellectual powers of the human have either been denied or neglected, or they have been reduced to the mind’s sensitive powers—sense-perception, memory, and imagination. With that goes a further reduction of all psychological phenomena to the action of sense-organs and the brain.
“Adler’s thoroughgoing critique of both of the above reductions restores the intellect to its primacy in the understanding of the mind. He explains the intellect’s uniqueness, its immateriality, the role it plays both in our sense-experience and in our knowledge of an independent reality, and how it functions as the source of meaning in our use of language.
“In addition to providing an understanding of the intellect’s cognitive and appetitive powers, Adler discusses our intellectual virtues and vices—our use and misuse of the intellect, as well as the consequences we suffer from its total neglect. It is only by our intellectual powers, Adler affirms, that we transcend matter and live in a world of ideas beyond the reach of the senses.”
To give you some idea of the topics discussed in this book, I have reproduced the table of contents:
I. Basic Issues and Question
1. Coming to Terms
2. Is the Mind Observable?
3. Is Our Intellect Unique
4. Is our Intellect Immaterial?
5. Artificial Intelligence and the Human Intellect
6. Extraterrestrial Intelligence
II. Serious Mistakes
7. About Philosophy in Relation to Common Sense.
8. About What Exists Independently of the Mind (Including a Note About Reality in Relation to Quantum Mechanics)
9. About What the Mind Draws from Experience
10. About How One Realm of Meanings Underlies the Diversity of Languages
11. About How the Plurality of Cultures Springs from the Unity of Mind
III. The Powers of the Intellect
12. The Triad of Powers, Habits, and Acts
13. Cognitive Power and Its Acts: Conception, Judgment, Reasoning
14. Appetitive Power and Its Acts: Willing and Choosing
IV. The Use, Misuse, and Nonuse of the Intellect
15. Intellectual Virtue and Vice: Passions
16. The Neglect of the Intellect: Sloth
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