By Harvey Schachter The Globe and Mail , 12/1/2010 Lao Tzu, Freud, Elizabeth I, and Marx are an unlikely quartet of leadership gurus. But they are a sample of an eclectic group of writers and leaders whose words are captured in Harvard University professor Barbara Kellerman’s compilation Leadership:...

By Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich , npr.org "If you've ever kept a journal, you've probably worried about someone coming across it and getting an uninvited peek into your personal life. But the daily traces we leave behind in our writings – more and more in today's world of emails,...

by Terry Eagleton from New Statesman For Walter Benjamin, history was more than a series of dispassionate facts. He showed how the struggle for the past shapes our future. "The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed...

The Fall 2009 issue of In Character, a publication dedicated to exploring single virtues from different persepctives, explores the concept of wisdom. Table of Contents Charlotte Hays More Than Knowledge William Desmond Wisdom of the Ages Charlotte Allen Athena's Surprising Portfolio Michael Walzer...

By Andrew Koppelman Commentary on A Secular Age by Charles Taylor RELIGIOUS FAITH today is one option among others. Many people—call them secularists—live without any transcendent source of value. Some, but not all, are militant atheists. A millennium ago, this would have been unimaginable. Everyone...

MSNBC reporter Robin Lloyd interviews Defining Wisdom grantees Deborah Coen ("Uncertain Ground: A Historical Tectonics of Wisdom"), Ankur Gupta ("Wisdom is Compression: Data Compression as a Mathematical Measure of Wisdom"), and Jean Gordon ("Wisdom in Words: The Relationship...

By Monika Ardelta, Scott D. Landesa and George E. Vaillant Abstract: According to theories of stress-related growth, coping with traumatic events can lead to greater psychosocial maturity in resilient individuals or psychosocial maladjustment in less resilient individuals. Using a sample of 160 World...

By Lewis Asimeng-Boahene Preparing children to function effectively as global citizens in today's complex and ethnically polarized nations and the world, will require students who think critically about the knowledge of the histories, experiences, and the cultural practices of other parts of the...

Simon T. Kaye Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood...

By Hayrettín Yücesoy This article discusses the translation of ancient Greek, Indian, and Persian texts of philosophy and sciences into Arabic from the eighth through the tenth centuries c.e. In particular, it addresses the issue of how ancient sciences were justified and legitimized in the early ‘Abbāsid...

By Tarmo Toom This study compares Augustine's remarks on language acquisition in the Confessions with those of Stoics, Epicureans, and Pyrrhonists and assesses the similarities and differences of the respective accounts. It studies a specific issue in Augustine's philosophy of language, language...

During the tumultuous final decade of the Thirty Years War, the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III used music as an important tool to further his religious and political agendas. Using the political ramifications of the emperor's public devotion to the Immaculate Conception as a frame of reference...

By Valerie Tiberius At end the of July, 2010, a small group of philosophers and psychologists met at the Rosewood Inn in Hastings, Minnesota to talk about wisdom. The workshop included five sessions. The first four sessions were organized around presentations by a philosopher and a psychologist on the...

At the Defining Wisdom Network Meeting in June 2009, participants were asked to come up with a series of questions about wisdom that might shed light on the broad issues of our project. One participant asked the following question: “Has the world become more or less wise in the last 50 years? Or is the...

Looking at the geographical distribution of natural disasters in the course of history, one might well wonder how earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and forest fires can take tragic human tolls, again and again, in the very same place . Why do people return to these vulnerable sites? Why are they unable...