Concept
Intellectualism
Overview
Intellectualism is the mental perspective that emphasizes the use, development, and exercise of the intellect, and is identified with the life of the mind of the intellectual. In the field of philosophy, the term intellectualism indicates one of two ways of critically thinking about the character of the world: (i) rationalism, which is knowledge derived solely from reason; and (ii) empiricism, which is knowledge derived solely from sense experience. Each intellectual approach attempts to eliminate fallacies that ignore, mistake, or distort evidence about "what ought to be" instead of "what is" the character of the world.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
As a french disciple of his well expresses it: 'Bergson claims of us first of all a certain inner catastrophe, and not every one is capable of such a logical revolution. But those who have once found themselves flexible enough for the execution of such a psychological change of front, discover somehow that they can never return again to their ancient attitude of mind. They are now Bergsonians ... and possess the…
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
The chapter “BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM” is titled for Intellectualism; names Intellectualism twice.
But hereupon some one may exclaim, as did a colleague recently: "Welcome to the ranks of the intellectualists!" If so, the experimentalist is bound to reply that he is as willing, and as unwilling, to be welcomed to the ranks of intellectualism as to those of anti-intellectualism. He wonders, however, how long the welcome would last in either.
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
Names Intellectualism several times; opens on Intellectualism.
the assumption that the possibility of true knowledge in general is in dispute, and the assumption that it is possible for us at our will either to prosecute or to abandon cognition. The concept or possibility of cognition has come out as intelligence itself, as the certitude of reason: the act of cognition itself is therefore the actuality of intelligence.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Close in meaning to Intellectualism; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Intellectualism
- Intellectual
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Peter Abelard
- Antonio Gramsci
- Rudolf Christoph Eucken
- Petre P. Negulescu
- Julio Cabrera (philosopher)
- Henry Veatch
Related ideas
- Empiricism
- Cartesianism
- Philosophy
- Stoicism
- Meister Eckhart
- Thomas Aquinas
- Intellectual
- Knowledge
- Classical antiquity
- Rhetoric
- Socrates
- Roger Bacon
- Authenticity (philosophy)
- Intellect
- Value (ethics)
- Reason
- Morality
- Human nature
- Michel Foucault
- Averroes
- Virtue
- Islam
- Rationalism
- Will (philosophy)
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.