Assigning Value to Intuitive Dimensions in Creativity

Assigning Value to Intuitive Dimensions in Creativity The abilities described by people as intuitive processes include anything from having an unexplained feeling surrounding an event, or having met with a psychic experience, the latter occurring mostly without a catalyst or deliberate engagement. This paper briefly explores the use of these intuitive qualities within the subject of creativity, a thinking skill enhanced by using all available resources. A brief questionnaire was administered to fifteen colleagues regarding information or feelings gained from intuition, dreams, unexplained voice contact or sensations, visual events, and other self-described developments that could be classified as intuitive phenomena. The results are posted in Appendix C. Studies searching for sixth sense have been conducted at Stanford University in California, and The Rhine Research Institute at Duke University; intuitive work has been researched by Cynthia Burnett at The International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College, New York and begun early on by Jean Houston. This paper is intended to put forward the idea of using the intuitive sixth sense as a tool, in spite of its subjective, qualitative characteristics

Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Science of Lyell, Darwin, and Freud

My dissertation, “Strata, Soma, Psyche: Narrative and the Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Science of Lyell, Darwin, and Freud,” contributes new research to the diverse field mapping the intersections of science and literature in the nineteenth century. Although scholars such as Gillian Beer and George Levine have established ties between developments in the natural sciences and the scope of the nineteenth-century novel, there has not been a sustained effort to attend to the narrative structures of the primary texts that most influenced coterminous literary movements of the period. My work thus attends closely to the narrative and imaginative form of scientific writing that attempts to transcend the limits of what can be seen. All three of Charles Lyell’s, Charles Darwin’s, and Sigmund Freud’s discipline-making texts (The Principles of Geology, The Origin of Species, and The Interpretation of Dreams) deal with historical forces whose operations cannot be observed in action, but only through the traces that are left behind. Three long single-author chapters detail how each text reconciles the ambition to establish a new branch of empirical science with the necessity of relying on the imagination to ford the gaps in physical evidence. I provide close readings of these foundational texts, identifying in each the rhetorical systems by which it represents and details what has never been present, and I demonstrate how each author strategically employs methods more conventionally associated with fictional narratives in the pursuit of establishing scientific facts. As a result, my project reframes the dominant concerns of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science Studies by focusing in on how literary point of view, diversely defined, enables scientific thought to find a language in which to speak

The Religious Naturalism of William James: A New Interpretation Through the Lens of Liberal Naturalism

This thesis argues that recent developments in philosophical naturalism mandate a new naturalistic reading of James. To that end, it presents the first comprehensive reading of James through the lens of liberal rather than scientific naturalism. Chapter 1 offers an extensive survey of the varieties of philosophical naturalism that provides the conceptual tools required for the rest the thesis, and allows us to provisionally locate James within the field. Crucially, it establishes the coherence and validity of a radical form of liberal naturalism that rejects 'the causal closure of the physical', and endorses doctrines of strong emergentism and macro-causation. The thesis will argue that it was to this form of naturalism that James was ultimately committed. Chapter 2 provides a detailed chronological treatment of James's key published works, seeking to understand the development of certain core naturalistic themes over the course of his career. It unearths a nascent doctrine of emergentism in The Principles, a critique of scientificism in The Will to Believe, a psycho-biological account of religious experience in The Varieties, a doctrine of panpsychist identism in Essays in Radical Empiricism, an evolutionary theory of cognition in Pragmatism, and a doctrine of finite theism in A Pluralistic Universe. The underlying aim of chapter 2 is to demonstrate the superficiality of James's endorsement of piecemeal supernaturalism in The Varieties. It shows that he had originally planned to defend a doctrine of 'theistic naturalism' in his second course of Gifford Lectures, and that he only defined himself as a supernaturalist in contradistinction to a particularly austere doctrine of 'mechanical naturalism' that endorses 'the causal closure of the physical'. James, whilst he rejected 'the causal closure of the physical', continued to endorse 'the causal closure of nature'. Through the schema developed in chapter 1, the thesis demonstrates how James can be classified as a radical religious naturalist. Finally, in chapter 3, the thesis enters a more consciously constructive phase. Building on James's suggestion that his philosophy was "too much like an arch built only on one side", it embarks upon a detailed reconstruction of 'the arch of James's naturalism'. It argues that reconstructed versions of James's doctrines of panpsychism and emergentism, in addition to being coherent and fertile in their own right, serve as the basis for a restoration of his theistic naturalism; the missing keystone of his mature philosophy

The Thought Remolding Campaign of the Chinese Communist Party-state

In its comprehensive analysis of a wide range of primary and secondary sources in both Chinese and Western languages, this authoritative work stands as the definitive study of the theory, implementation and legacy of the Chinese Communist Party's thought-remolding campaign. This decades-long campaign involved the extraction of confessions from millions of Chinese citizens suspected of heterodoxy or disobedience to party dictates, along with their subjection to various forms of "re-education" and indoctrination. Hu Ping's carefully structured overview provides a valuable insider's perspective, and supersedes the previous landmark study on this vastly interesting topic.Deze studie gaat in op de theorie, uitvoering en nalatenschap van de propagandacampagne van de Chinese Communistische Partij. Deze decennialange campagne bestond onder andere uit het ondervragen van miljoenen burgers die verdacht werden van andersdenkendheid of ongehoorzaamheid. Deze zorgvuldig gestructureerde verhandeling overstijgt de klassieke studie Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1969) van Robert jay Lifton. In tegenstelling tot het werk van Lifton, hanteert Hu Pings studie een eigentijds postcommunistisch perspectief en is het verrijkt met ervaringen van Chinezen die direct gevolgen hebben ondervonden van de maoïstische propagandacampagne

Comparison of the vocabularies of the Gregg shorthand dictionary and Horn-Peterson's basic vocabulary of business letters

This study is a comparative analysis of the vocabularies of Horn and Peterson's The Basic Vocabulary of Business Letters1 and the Gregg Shorthand Dictionary.2 Both books purport to present a list of words most frequently encountered by stenographers and students of shorthand. The, Basic Vocabulary of Business Letters, published "in answer to repeated requests for data on the words appearing most frequently in business letters,"3 is a frequency list specific to business writing. Although the book carries the copyright date of 1943, the vocabulary was compiled much earlier. The listings constitute a part of the data used in the preparation of the 10,000 words making up the ranked frequency list compiled by Ernest Horn and staff and published in 1926 under the title of A Basic Writing Vocabulary: 10,000 Words Lost Commonly Used in Writing. The introduction to that publication gives credit to Miss Cora Crowder for the contribution of her Master's study at the University of Minnesota concerning words found in business writing. With additional data from supplementary sources, the complete listing represents twenty-six classes of business, as follows 1. Miscellaneous 2. Florists 3. Automobile manufacturers and sales companie

History of Psychology

Openly licensed anthology focused on the theme of the History of Psychology. Contains: The Mind and the Brain by Alfred Binet; Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners by Sigmund Freud; The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James; The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2) by William James; Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology by C. G. Jung; Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay; The Psychology of Arithmetic by Edward L. Thorndike

Three chapters in the history of femicide

This dissertation describes the genesis of the idea of femicide in a period of English and American Letters, the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, in which patriarchal values and constructions were entering a crisis which resulted in the revision of the idea of gender—in a way, that was the period in which the concept of gender was coded. In the first chapter, I look at the way the term femicide was first given currency in the English language in 1827 through Robert Macnish’s The Confessions of an Unexecuted Femicide, a fiction disguised as a true story, and how it spawned a short-lived literary sub-genre. In the second chapter, I examine Poe’s reworking of the femicide story, and to the ways in which he has drawn attention to its Gothic roots. Finally, in the third chapter, I offer a reading of Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,’ in which I argue that Godwin’s “sentimentalised” portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, and by extension of the female intellectual, constitutes an implicit refutation of her ideas, and therefore can be profitably compared to the portraits Poe’s femicide narrators make of Morella and Ligeia in the tales named after them.Esta dissertação descreve a génese da ideia de femicídio durante um período nas letras Anglo-saxónicas, entre a última década do séc. XVIII e meados do século seguinte, em que os valores e elaborações ideológicas patriarcais entravam numa crise que conduziria a uma revisão da ideia de género (de certo modo, poder-se-ia mesmo dizer que é nesse período que o conceito de género começa a ser codificado). No primeiro capítulo, descrevo como o termo femicídio ganhou pela primeira vez projecção na língua inglesa depois da publicação, em 1827, de The Confessions of an Unexecuted Femicide de Robert Macnish, uma ficção apresentada ostensivamente como relato verídico que deu origem a um efémero sub-género de ficção, a que chamo “história de femicídio.” No segundo capítulo examino a reinterpretação da história de femicídio por Edgar Allan Poe, e sobre o modo como este autor pôs em evidência as suas raízes góticas. Finalmente, no terceiro capítulo, apresento uma leitura de Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ em que argumento que o retrato “sentimentalizado” que Godwin aí faz de Mary Wollstonecraft, e por extensão da mulher intelectual, porquanto constitui uma refutação implícita das ideias dessa autora, ganha em ser comparado com os retratos que os narradores femicídas de Poe fazem das suas esposas em “Morella” e “Ligeia.