Concept
Intelligence
Overview
Intelligence () has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
The term rose to prominence during the early 1900s. Most psychologists believe that intelligence can be divided into various domains or competencies.
Intelligence has been long-studied in humans, and across numerous disciplines. It has also been observed in the cognition of non-human animals. Some researchers have suggested that plants exhibit forms of intelligence, though this remains controversial.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Intelligence is discussed.
The real nature of intelligence as it appears in the development of mathematics is something quite other than that of sensory analysis. Intelligence is fundamentally skill, and although skill may be acquired in connection with some sort of sensory contact of an organism and environment, it is only determined by that contact in the sense that if the sensory conditions were different the needs of the organism might be…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; the book is about it; opens on it
Now that which observes is intelligence; so the Animal himself should then be called, not intelligence, but the intelligible. Shall we therefrom conclude that the things contemplated by intelligence are outside of it? If so, intelligence possesses only images, instead of the realities themselves--that is, if we admit that the realities exist up there; for, according to Plato, the veritable reality is up there within…
Plotinus, Plotinos
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Having premised these axioms, I ask the following question: Aristotle holds that the first Intelligence is the cause of the second, the second of the third, and so on, till the thousandth, if we assume a series of that number. Now the first Intellect is undoubtedly simple. How then can the compound form of existing things come from such an Intellect by fixed laws of Nature, as Aristotle assumes?
Moses Maimonides, The guide for the perplexed
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
The recognition that intelligence is properly an organ of adjustment in difficult situations makes us aware that past theories were of value so far as they helped carry to an issue the social perplexities from which they emerged. But the chief impact of the evolutionary method is upon the present.
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
The action of intelligence as theoretical mind has been called _cognition_ (knowledge). Yet this does not mean intelligence _inter alia_ knows,—besides which it also intuites, conceives, remembers, imagines, &c.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
names the idea; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Intelligence
Related ideas
- Emotion
- Cognition
- Francis Bacon
- Artificial intelligence
- Creativity
- Problem solving
- Correlation
- John Locke
- Absurdity
- Language
- Learning
- Cosmology
- Middle Ages
- Metaphysics
- Information
- Understanding
- Species
- Nervous system
- Psychology
- Motivation
- Knowledge
- Critical thinking
- Abstraction
- Thomas Hobbes
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Deontology.