Thinker's progress

Better Writers, Better Thinkers

Many chapters in this book provide a good sense of what writing to learn is and how it works. I will explain in this chapter how I use writing-to-learn techniques to help students to think through an idea more clearly. Two aspects of writing to learn are very important: it helps students to understand content better, and it shows them that writing is a process with various stages. When students...

Brain Imaging for Legal Thinkers

¶1 It has become increasingly common for brain images to be proffered as evidence in civil and criminal litigation.2 This Article offers some general guidelines to legal thinkers about how to understand brain imaging studies—or at least avoid misunderstanding them. And it annotates a published brain imaging study by several of the present authors (and others) in order to illustrate and explain,...

Thinking about the Conservative Thinkers

Module 7 Key Thinkers Lecture 37

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) is considered one of the "fathers" of sociology because of his effort to establish sociology as a discipline distinct from philosophy and psychology. This effort is evident in the two main themes that permeate Durkheim's work: the priority of the social over the individual and the idea that society can be studied scientifically. Durkheim's concept of social facts, in ...

Dion, Theon, and the Many-thinkers Problem

My solution to the problem of Dion and Theon (Burke 1994a) employs the doctrine of sortal essentialism.1 Jim Stone (2002) objects to my solution and proposes to weaken the doctrine so as to block my employment of it. Others question a different element of my solution: the maximality of personhood and thinkerhood. After opposing Stone's weakening of sortal essentialism, and responding in a preli...