"When people reflect on what it takes to be mentally fit, the first idea that comes to mind is usually intelligence. The smarter you are, the more complex the problems you can solve— and the faster you can solve them. Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.
Mental horsepower doesn’t guarantee mental dexterity. No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again. Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.
The curse of knowledge is that it closes your mind to what you don’t know. Good judgment depends on having the skill— and the will— to open your mind. A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of the most cherished parts of your identity."
— Adam Grant in Think Again
“The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.”
--Niall Ferguson
"I am not at all sure that I am right in my hopefulness, but I am convinced that it is as important to present all of the inherent hopes of the present as it is to confront ruthlessly all its intrinsic despairs." — Hannah Arendt
What interests Collingwood is not history consisting of statements which can be tested against scientific criteria, but the idea of history itself.
“In the long run, we are all dead” was more than a clever turn of phrase. It distinguished Keynes from other contemporary monetarists, and those in the years to come who would affiliate themselves with right-wing politics. Like the monetarist Milton Friedman, Keynes looked to price stability as a way to shore up classical economic thinking. For the most part, he believed, laissez-faire economics worked. Supply and demand did bring society to a prosperous equilibrium. They just needed a few pieces of basic economic architecture to work: property rights, the rule of law, and price stability. But unlike Friedman, Keynes had arrived at monetarism as a creative way to expand the power of the state to fight the uncertainties and anxieties of postwar life.
What, as a thinking subject closed in behind the brain’s pane of glass, do any of us know about what is really going on inside anyone else? What storms rage within them? Or perhaps there is nothing at all happening in there—is there really complete and permanent calm?
Conservatives were facing the difficult truth that, as the American scholar Harvey Mansfield put it, they were “no longer the hardy few.” Used to presenting themselves as intellectual outs, conservatives were now the ins. How, though, would conservatives know who they were and what they stood for without an orthodoxy to oppose? Who was the right to argue with?
Using the border situations as his point of departure, he [Karl Jaspers] attempts to develop a new type of philosophizing based on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The primary mission of this philosophizing is not to instruct; it consists of a “perpetual agitation, a perpetual appeal [author's italics] to the life force in oneself and in others.” This is Jaspers’s way of participating in that revolt against philosophy with which modern philosophy began. He attempts to transform philosophy into philosophizing and to find ways by which philosophical “results” can be communicated in such a way that they lose their character as results.
