Thinking about Pilgrimage, Particularly in Modern Japan

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

Early Modern Japan

There were two forms of nativism1 during the Tokugawa period. The first was literary in orientation. Literary nativists undertook exhaustive and comprehensive studies of Japan’s classical literature, and both poetry and prose works were central to their scholarship. An array of luminary intellects mostly from the eighteenth century made their mark on this form of nativism, including Keichū (164...

Early Modern Japan

Renewed interest in the collaborative form haikai no renga 誹諧の連歌 was an integral part of the mid-eighteenth century "Back to Bashō" movement, in which Yosa Buson 与謝蕪村 (1716-1783) and his associates condemned the commercialized practices that characterized contemporary haikai and argued for a return to the ideals of Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 (1644-1694). After the death of Bashō, who had made ga 雅, or e...