Misunderstandings are one of the typical features of being human. We can be confident in declaring that every person who has ever lived has misunderstood others and was misunderstood by others at least once in life. This reveals the interpretive structure of our thinking and the fundamental role understanding plays in our lives. Understanding is …
Continue reading Heraclitus Meets Derrida and Saunders: Misunderstanding and Oversimplification
What connects art, science, education, and nature? Watch this video where a visual artist, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and an educator discuss what I would call the human experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, communication in its various forms is at the heart of our meaning-making. Enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R11FofCPoQ4 Keeping up the "Spreading the Word" tradition, I hope to …
Continue reading Spreading the Word: Connecting Art and Science
This is the final part of the 3-part series on the art of thinking and pratice of persuasion as gathered from Plato's dialogue Phaedrus (a version of its translation available here). So far I have concluded that Socrates had the following goal in this dialogue: to demonstrate that no practice deserves to be called art if its practitioner does …
Continue reading Socrates and Phaedrus: Art of Thinking and Practice of Persuasion (Part 3 of 3)
This Friday I share with you a sheer pleasure of a podcast - in it, Stephen Fry tells about his lifelong obsession with language. Dive right in and enjoy! Link to the podcast: Obsession with Language Keeping up the "Spreading the Word" tradition, every Friday, I hope to share with you an article I've read …
Last week I published the first part of this 3-part series. This is the second part of the article where I continue by exploring in more detail the ideas that can be gathered from Plato's dialogue Phaedrus (a version of its translation available here). Of course, there are many insights that can be gleaned. The one I …
Continue reading Socrates and Phaedrus: Art of Thinking and Practice of Persuasion (Part 2 of 3)
This Friday I share with you another great podcast - about the power of storytelling. What more need I say? Relax and enjoy! Link to the podcast: The power of telling stories Photo by Sunsetoned from Pexels Keeping up the "Spreading the Word" tradition, every Friday, I hope to share with you an article I've read or a …
In Plato's dialogue Phaedrus (a version of its translation available here), Socrates discusses the merits of rhetoric as the art of speaking. He wants to establish whether rhetoric, as practised and taught in Athens by the orators at the time and understood as "a way of directing the soul by means of speech" (we could say - …
Continue reading Socrates and Phaedrus: Art of Thinking and Practice of Persuasion (Part 1 of 3)
This Friday I share with you a fascinating podcast on the role of emojis in our modern-day communication. I absolutely enjoyed listening to it, not just because of the illuminating content but also because of all the times it made me laugh. Hopefully it will do the same for you. Also, in case you find …
This Friday I share with you a video on the relationship between language and communication. In it, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Karen Lewis explores what is considered to be the most philosophically influential theory on the question of how what we mean is related to what we say - H.P. Grice’s theory of pragmatics. I …
Continue reading Spreading the Word: Philosophy of Language and Communication
In this week's "Spreading the Word", I share with you 2 videos on philosophy of communication. The first one is a useful short introduction into the main thoughts of a 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein about language and the meaning it is used to convey. I recommend you watch this video first and then proceed …
Continue reading Spreading the Word: Philosophy of Communication
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