Within this book we will explore the history, definition, methods, and tools which contribute to understanding. We will see how global understanding, through SAPIENT THINKING, "wise thinking", forms the road-map for achieving our future sustainability and resolving our contemporary challenges; to truly become HOMO SAPIENS, "the wise ones".

Thinking About Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism addresses our existential crisis by reminding us of the conditions for meaning that have been obscured by the modern technological mentality. Madden weaves together disparate insights from Wittgenstein, Hegel, Aristotle, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Sophocles, and others in an attempt to account for our mindedness in terms of its inextricable connection to a world capable of inspiring our care. The mind is not a discrete entity locked behind the skull or withdrawn into a ghostly realm, but a participation in an inheritance (biological and cultural) held in common with other participants, and taking responsibility for that world is crucial for the meaning. The ever-increasing technological mediation of our lives undermines this worldliness. We are subsequently “losing our minds,” and as our mindedness fades, so goes our sense of dignity and value. Madden makes this case deploying insights from phenomenology, analytic philosophy, Aristotelianism, neuroscience, and cognitive science, and along the way confronts the mind-body problem, freedom, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and nihilism. More importantly, he invites the reader into an accessible dialogue concerning issues of grave importance to the meaning of our lives.

Continental philosophy of education and North American educational thinking are two traditions of their own, yet it is fruitful to compare for similarities and differences between the two and thus generate interest in a mutual dialogue and exchange between European and North American of philosophy of education. The present book analyzes theoretical thinking on education from the standpoints of both traditions. The book deals with continental educational thinking while discussing the notion of Bildung and its diversity, from J.A.Comenius to Th. Adorno. In addition, the book discusses the idea of growth inherited from American progressive education and classical Pragmatism. The various contributors to the book offer insights to the theoretical discussion on education, and specify the historical and thematic connections between different thinking models. The book shows that connections between continental educational theories and classical Pragmatism are stronger than generally assumed. As such, the book invites the readers to challenge their own prejudices and views on Bildung and growth, and the relationship between them. “Education would be tyranny if it did not lead to freedom.” (J.F. Herbart) “The teacher who can get along by keeping spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with the greatest skill.” (W. James)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is alive and in love, living in the world¿s first sentient city, Ipolis. Lucky for both of them, nobody knows, but how long can it stay that way?

"Color Monitors looks at a particular subset of imagined computer use, focusing on scenarios that demand from the person at the keyboard an intimate technical knowledge. My research has uncovered a peculiar pattern: race comes into sharp relief when computer use is depicted as difficult labor requiring special expertise. Time and again, in such scenarios, the helpful person of color is there to take the call—to provide technical support, to deal with the machines. In interpreting such images, Color Monitors analyzes the computer-fearing strain in American whiteness, an aspect of white identity that defines itself against information technology and the racial other imagined to love it and excel at it."—Martin KevorkianFollowing up on Ralph Ellison's intimation that blacks serve as "the machines inside the machine," Color Monitors examines the designation of black bodies as natural machines for the information age. Martin Kevorkian shows how African Americans are consistently depicted as highly skilled, intelligent, and technologically savvy as they work to solve complex computer problems in popular movies, corporate advertising, and contemporary fiction. But is this progress? Or do such seemingly positive depictions have more disturbing implications? Kevorkian provocatively asserts that whites' historical "fear of a black planet" has in the age of microprocessing converged with a new fear of computers and the possibility that digital imperatives will engulf human creativity.Analyzing escapist fantasies from Mission: Impossible to Minority Report, Kevorkian argues that the placement of a black man in front of a computer screen doubly reassures audiences: he is nonthreatening, safely occupied—even imprisoned—by the very machine he attempts to control, an occupation that simultaneously frees the action heroes from any electronic headaches. The study concludes with some alternatives to this scheme, looking to a network of recent authors, with shared affinities for Ellison and Pynchon, willing to think inside the black box of technology.Connecting race, technology, and American empire, Color Monitors will attract attention from scholars working in emerging areas of race theory, African American studies, film studies, cultural studies, and technology and communication studies.

Shows why reading and writing are essential to developing a consciousness of language that, in turn, lies at the core of rationality.

Offers a new understanding of representational cognition that synthesizes postwar philosophical approaches to the question of objective knowledge This study develops a novel account of representational cognition, explaining how cognitive systems progressively come to map the structure of their worlds. Daniel Sacilotto offers a constructive response to the critique of representation formulated throughout the post‐Kantian philosophical tradition. Rather than a skepticism or idealism whereby thinking can grasp appearances but never the real, representation, Sacilotto shows, is a constitutive dimension of cognitive systems’ creative capacity to know and intervene in the world of which they are part. Structure and Thought: Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition integrates various lines in contemporary philosophy, including those often seen as incommensurable or in irresolvable tension with one another. Sacilotto thus advances a productive synthesis of a materialist ambition to provide a creative and historical understanding of cognition with a structural realist account of representation. He shows how the different forms of sensory, discursive, and theoretical mediation that characterize human cognition are conducive to a realist epistemological framework that explains how the possibility of knowledge about a mind‐independent reality is conceivable.