Introduction: Beside Thinking

Animal Thinking an Introduction

The topic of this Strüngmann Forum—animal thinking—was not formulated as a question—“Do animals think?—but rather as a statement. One might question whether we have already gone too far by making such a statement, but this obviously depends on what we mean by “thinking.” If one believes that thinking refers only to mental processes accessible through human conscious recollection, then thinking ...

Thinking Critically An introduction

Critical thinking is an essential skill for students, academics and those whose thinking forms an important aspect of their jobs. Critical thinking is a way of seeing things and a descriptive term for the set of methods used to consider problems. It leads to an informed, aware, systemic, considered and logical approach to deciding what to believe or do; with arguments and conclusions that are m...

Causality Hul256 Critical Thinking Introduction

Analogical thinking: An introduction in the context of design

Analogical thinking is a core process of design thinking. This is because design is a cognitive activity (e.g., Cross, 2004; Visser, 2006), and analogy is a core process of cognition (e.g., Hofstadter, 2001; Thagard, 2005). Of course, design is a very wide-ranging and open-ended cognitive activity. For example, design typically is situated in and distributed over the physical world (e.g., desig...

Introduction: Notions of Time in Chinese Historical Thinking

Is there a characteristic Chinese conception of historical time, or perhaps a conception of time with Chinese characteristics? As far as such metahistorical issues are concerned, the title of this volume is noncommittal. It does not claim, for example, that there was a unitary conception of time in Chinese historical thinking, or that notions of time that developed in China differed essentially...