Wisdom

In order to better cope with the pressures and stresses of the current day, modern psychology is anxiously seeking to find new therapies to address the increasing disorders within the human psyche. In the process new fields of research, such as humanistic and transpersonal psychology, curiously appear to borrow more and more from the wisdom of the ages. This volume, containing eighteen articles by noteworthy expositors of the perennial philosophy such as Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Frithjof Schuon, presents the spiritual psychology of the wisdom traditions as a much-needed antidote to the current impasse in modern psychology.

Some Endorsements for Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy:

“[Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy] is more than an anthology. It is a wisely crafted collection of classic and contemporary scholarship noting that what many are seeking is what has always been, a perennial philosophy, that remains foundational. As one of the authors, Tage Lindbom, properly notes, ‘Secularization is a fish in troubled waters.’ This book claims the waters and is essential reading for all those who may have forgotten or are simply ignorant of the rich foundation provided by the perennial philosophy.”
—Ralph W. Hood, Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, past president of the Psychology of Religion division of the American Psychological Association, co-founder of The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion and co-author of The Psychology of Religion

“A necessary and bracing critique of the assumptions and limitations of contemporary Western psychology, this generous volume is also a passionate call and learned guide towards a truer perspective that embraces man's spiritual nature.”
—Gabor Maté, M.D., and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“Knowing the nature of the mind is perhaps the most difficult undertaking, especially in today’s world. To comprehend the nature of mind one needs to turn to the domain of religion and spirituality. Yet the truth of the mind and its complexity cannot explicitly be defined in words. Inner or transcendent wisdom sees the mind’s own nature without the duality of the seer. Suchness (tathatā) of mind is only experiential and not expressible. The words used to describe thought are themselves a product of thought, which is conditioned and limited. Thus, differences and contradictions are unavoidable. Therefore, a comparative study of different viewpoints and commentaries is immensely important to awaken the inner intelligence to see the mind as it is. Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy: Studies in Comparative Religion edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is an outstanding effort in this direction.”
—Samdhong Rinpoche, former Prime Minister (Kalon Tripa) of the Tibetan Government-in-exile, author of Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World: Tibetan Buddhism and Today’s World

“The rise of psychology has impacted the study and practice of spirituality, the experiences and attitudes relevant to ultimate human values that transcend ordinary behavior. Each chapter of this remarkable book demonstrates this interaction in a unique and provocative way. But rather than using psychology to reduce and ‘psychologize’ spiritual topics, its authors demonstrate how directives from the spiritual traditions can enhance and even illuminate the enduring importance of psychology in the 21st century.”
—Stanley Krippner, Saybrook University, co-author of Spiritual Dimensions of Healing

“The work at hand is a thinking and debating man’s delight. If you have any interest at all in attempting to include an educated and enlightened view of man’s higher functions in your purview of the world, you will learn from and enjoy this collection of essays. If you already have some knowledge in this area, brace yourself: you may see some of your favorites sharply criticized. A thought-provoking work.”
—Bruce W. Scotton, University of California, San Francisco, co-editor of Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology

“This book, superbly edited by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, is a masterful critique of the field of psychology and its loss of the sacred ground in which it once was rooted. It offers depth psychologists an opportunity to contemplate timeless truths echoed through the centuries by perennial philosophers who have always claimed psyche is subordinate to Spirit. Although ignored in depth psychology’s early years due to prejudice and lack of understanding, this is a message today’s psychotherapists must take seriously. Human beings need a deeper and wider transpersonal vision of who and what we are, which the saints and sages of the world’s spiritual traditions have always pointed to. In psychotherapy with a therapist committed to such a vision, patients penetrate into their unconscious depths and not infrequently awaken to the Ground of all Being. Their suffering itself occurred because they had turned away from Spirit. Above all, this volume passionately calls upon depth psychology to remember its origin in the perennial wisdom at the core of the great religions. There is something of a polemic in these pages. It deserves to be considered by depth psychologists of all persuasions.”
—Bryan Wittine, Transpersonal psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst

“This anthology from Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is a must reference for anyone who is interested in psychology and its relationship to spirituality, and in developing an inclusive dialogue between disciplines that favor an integral outlook on the person and his or her potential. Selections in this anthology will inspire us to reexamine the metaphysical underpinnings of psychology, and remind us how important it is to rise above science’s attempt to reduce the human being to an epistemic object.”
—Sangeetha Menon, National Institute of Advanced Studies (Bangalore, India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Beyond Experience: Consciousness in Bhagavad Gita

“This anthology has some of the most discerning essays and reviews on spirituality and psychology, which provide much-needed care and caution to all those engaged in bringing them together or who wish to do so in future. Therefore, it is a must-read for all those who teach, research, consult, or study in such frontier areas as transpersonal psychology, states of consciousness, mind-body relation, holistic health, Indian psychology, and so on. It will be an invaluable textbook for courses in these and other related areas. I congratulate the editor of the book.”
—Kiran Kumar K. Salagame, University of Mysore (India), Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), author of The Psychology of Meditation: A Contextual Approach

“One of the finest collections of essays on the Perennial Philosophy—a must-read for all psychologists who are engaged with spirituality and transpersonal psychology. The essays which critique modern psychology (including transpersonal psychology, and the framework of Carl Jung), in the light of the Perennial Philosophy are a revelation and make compelling reading. The book serves as a corrective to the excesses of modern psychology, and to this end Sotillos has done a commendable job. I for one will include the book in some of the graduate courses that I teach.”
—Suneet Varma, University of Delhi, co-editor of Foundations of Indian Psychology

“To its credit modern science by-and-large is becoming more cognizant of the essential connection between spirituality and psychological health and well-being and most of all its positive implications within the field of psychology. While there is ample data to document this in a plethora of academic journals and books, this new book Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy adds a novel contribution to the dialogue between psychology and spirituality, which captures many nuances that for the most part go unnoticed within these discussions, and last but not least, it provides a keen eye of discernment to understand this intricate relationship on a deeper level that is crucially needed. This work will be a valuable asset to students and long term mental health practitioners and professors alike who seek to better understand the relationship between psychology and spirituality.”
—Harold G. Koenig, Duke University, Director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, co-author of The Handbook of Religion and Health

A popular critical theory suggests that the epilogue of Qohelet, which recommends
discipline and piety, is a later addition aimed at reconciling the unorthodox ideas of
the book with conservative views. While this hypothesis is well-established on the
basis of the text’s style and content, no external evidence to support it has ever been
suggested. This paper seeks to present an empirical model for this redactional theory
from a comparative point of view. It examines the development of the vanity theme in
Mesopotamian literature, and shows that the subversive ideas of vanity literature gave
rise, from the very beginning, to redactional activity focused on re-interpreting it in
light of traditional values. Several examples of this process of conservative redaction
are discussed, including Sumerian, Akkadian, and Akkadian-Biblical cases. The theory
that the final verses of Qohelet are a later interpolation thus gains credibility in light of
similar phenomena in Mesopotamian literature.

Päivi Tynjälä, Eeva K. Kallio & Hannu H.L. Heikkinen This chapter examines adult thinking from the perspective of professional expertise and phronēsis, that is, practical wisdom. It first describes differences between experts and novices, and presents three conceptualisations of the development of expertise. This is followed by an analysis of the form of adult thinking referred to as integrative thinking, and phronēsis. The relationship of these two with expertise is examined. The analysis shows that professional expertise requires holistic thinking involving the ability to integrate or conciliate various and even conflicting perspectives in order to find new solutions to problems. Furthermore, the role of emotions and ethical reflection is emphasised. All this lead to the examination of practical wisdom, phronēsis, in particular. As a conclusion, a model of the nature of wisdom in professional expertise is presented, and it is suggested that the development of expertise and wisdom in the fast changing and complex world requires pedagogical approaches that support the integration and fusion of different forms of knowledge, various perspectives, and socially responsible ethical action and interaction in problem solving situations.

The article analyzes an Internet meme as the newest information product of the society and a result of its intellectual and artistic practices. The analysis of the role of the Internet memes, created by means of the popular artistic images modification in the modern digital culture is made. Such methods as semiotic and hermeneutic analysis of the Internet memes are used in the research work. The authors seek to explore the reasons for the popularity of memes in the processes of symbolic production and exchange in contemporary society and the modern digital culture, which is the purpose of this study. We consider that Internet meme created by using and modifying artistic images is a new phenomenon in human public life and new type of communication. As a hypothesis, a distinctive feature of the Internet meme is the surprise and laughter it causes in the “man of the Internet”. The main result of this article is the analysis the role of Internet memes in the newest information space and...

ΑΠΟΣΤΟΛΟΣ ΑΝΤ. ΚΑΠΡΟΥΛΙΑΣ, Μέλος ΣΕΠ Ελληνικού Ανοικτού Πανεπιστημίου ***_ Στην εργασία αυτή, θα επιχειρήσουμε, διά μίας στοιχειωδώς, αλλά με το  αναλυτικό και το συνθετικό στοιχείο να μην απεμπολούνται, ερμηνείας ενός επεισοδίου του διαλόγου Θεάγης -ο οποίος ανήκει στους νόθους πλατωνικούς διαλόγους-, να καταδείξουμε ότι το σωκρατικό δαιμόνιο παραπέμπει και σε μία ηθική και πολιτική διάσταση της ανθρώπινης «ευσέβειας». Ως τέτοιων, μάλιστα, ούτως ειπείν ιδεολογικών προσανατολισμών, η πραγματεία αυτή ορίζει τις προϋποθέσεις ενός ατομικού ή και ενός συλλογικού ευδαίμονος βίου. Βέβαια, κατά τον τρόπο με τον οποίο εκτυλίσσεται η συζήτηση-έρευνα στο υπό εξέταση επεισόδιο, επιβεβαιώνεται τελικώς πως ακόμη και η πολιτικών προτυπώσεων σημασιολόγηση της «ευσέβειας» συνιστά το αποτέλεσμα μίας προσωπικής του Σωκράτη βιωματικής πράξης και πως, ως τέτοια, αναζητεί τις αυτοεπικυρώσεις της κατά την ευρύτερη συλλογική αποδοχή της.

Recent discussions about the conception of self-knowledge in analytic philosophy have been concerned mainly with the distinctive way in which we know certain of our own properties. The flipside of this focus is that a sort of self-knowledge that requires effort in order to be achieved was rarely examined; and, as a consequence, it has been rarely discussed what reasons there are for individuals to strive for improving their self-assessment. It is against this background that I propose in this paper a working definition of the kind of self-knowledge that is also considered a personal achievement. Drawing some lessons from a few historical examples, I discuss what conditions have to be met for a subject to qualify as having this sort self-knowledge. I will close with a few considerations concerning the value this sort of self-knowledge has for the individual acquiring it.

As more evidence shows the capacity for growth
and fulfillment in the later years of life, the concept of
positive aging has value in promoting well-being and
enhancing the image of older adulthood. A paradigm
called Foray (4A) into Aging based on Awareness,
Attitude, Affiliation, and Activity demonstrates how this
new territory of positive aging can be realized.

Ժամանակակից գիտական և փիլիսո­փա­­յական գրականության մեջ գործածվող մե­տա «μετά» ծագումով հունարեն բառի բազ­­մի­մաս­­տութ­յան առաջ բե­րած խառ­նա­շփո­­թութ­յան արդյունքում ավելի ու ավելի է ծա­­ռա­նում դրանով ստեղծված տեր­­­մին­ների (և ոչ թե բառերի, քանի որ այդ նա­­խա­ծանցով ձևա­­վոր­ված բառերն ինքնին տեր­մին­ներ են) իմա­ս­տի ճշգրտման և համա­պա­տաս­խա­նա­բար դրանց մատնա­նշած տեսություն­նե­­րի կամ դրան­ցով ձևա­վոր­ված մե­տատեսութ­յուն­ների հստա­կեց­ման և տարբերակման խն­դի­­­րը:   Ներկա հետազոտության մեջ խնդիր է դրվել կիրառել ակա­դե­միկոս Գ.Բրուտ­յա­նի առա­­­­­ջադրած մետատեսութ­յան պլա­տոնյան և հռոդոսցյան կաղապարները (մո­դելները), փաս­­­տարկման նկատ­մամբ և պարզել, թե արդ­յոք հնարավոր է ստեղծել մետափաս­տար­­կում այդ կաղապարներից որևէ մեկով, հաշ­վի առնելով դրանցից յու­րաքանչյուրի առանձ­­­նա­հատ­կութ­յունները: Կատարվել է եզրա­հանգում. փաս­տարկ­ման ոչ ձևայնաց­վող համակարգի հա­մար, որն իմա­ցաբա­նա­կան դաշտ չէ, այլ մեթոդ է, մետա­տեսության գա­ղա­փարը կի­րա­ռելի է, եթե պահպանվում են հռոդոսցյան կա...

This pamphlet is on a new paradigm of sophocentrism (sophos = wisdom). This is wisdom centered philosophy. The academics focus on truth without it having any practical value to the common man. The truth-seeking of the academics is what I have used from a Derridian term: "logocentrism".

Derrida uses this term to mean: language as the expression of reality. I used this term to mean: the truth seeking of the philosophers since Thales (the first philosopher in Western philosophy), whom used reason to explain reality instead of mythology of the gods and spirits. The term logocentrism can also mean reason and even rationality, as compared to pathocentrism, which is the wisdom of our own emotions.

I have made this pamphlet with an accompanied part called: autoparaclete, which means: "self-help". The part of self-help is from a psychologist named: Clayton Tucker-Ladd. Most of that chapter is credited to him. I have connected his self-help theories with philosophical wisdom.

I wanted to make this an average sized book of a traditional publishing house at first, but I thought about writing this for a common person. Most people do not read for fun. And I thought if I am going to get people to read, or at least, for it to be more likely for a common reader to read my content, I thought of writing my content small.

Książka w sposób kompleksowy prezentuje problematykę postawy wobec śmierci w cyklu życia człowieka. Zawiera, po pierwsze, pogłębione studium teoretyczne integrujące w obrębie modelu Erika Eriksona najważniejsze odkrycia konceptualne i empiryczne w zakresie psychologii śmierci. Po drugie, na bazie psychoterapeutycznych doświadczeń autora zilustrowane i omówione zostały problematyczne aspekty postawy wobec śmierci, charakterystyczne dla różnych faz cyklu życia. Po trzecie, prezentuje przeprowadzone przez autora badania korelacyjne nad psychospołecznymi uwarunkowaniami postawy wobec śmierci w okresach adolescencji oraz wczesnej, średniej i późnej dorosłości, a także nad różnicami w zakresie postawy tanatycznej w badanych fazach życia. Zawarte w książce studia teoretyczne i kliniczne oraz badania korelacyjne pozwoliły sformułować wnioski praktyczne odnoszące się do pomocy psychologicznej osobom w różnych okresach rozwoju oraz wyznaczyć kierunki przyszłych badań nad problematyką postawy wobec śmierci w biegu życia człowieka.         

„Książka jest rzetelna naukowo, bogata treściowo, ciekawa i dobrze napisana. Cechują ją wysokie walory poznawcze i aplikacyjne. Dostarcza wielu przesłanek do pracy podejmowanej przez psychologów i psychoterapeutów. (…) Dla wielu współczesnych śmierć – choć nieunikniona – stanowi temat tabu. Marcin Sękowski je przełamuje, przedstawiając profesjonalnie problem stosunku do śmierci i jego osobowe uwarunkowania”.
prof. dr. hab. Maria Ledzińska (Uniwersytet Warszawski)


„Monografia będzie przydatna wszystkim osobom zajmującym się problemami osób, które stykają się z kwestią śmierci. Może służyć studentom, badaczom i praktykom w dziedzinach nauk społecznych i nauk o życiu, a także osobom uczestniczącym w ruchu hospicyjnym. (…) Pokazana w książce perspektywa ujmowania postawy wobec śmierci w cyklu życia człowieka pozwala na lepsze zrozumienie nas samych w sytuacji granicznej”.
dr hab. Paweł Izdebski, prof. UKW (Uniwersytet Kazimierza Wielkiego w Bydgoszczy)

Marcin Sękowski – psycholog, psychoterapeuta, doktor nauk społecznych w zakresie psychologii, adiunkt w Instytucie Psychologii Akademii Pedagogiki Specjalnej im. Marii Grzegorzewskiej w Warszawie. Jego zainteresowania naukowe obejmują przede wszystkim problematykę tanatologiczną, w tym zagadnienia postawy wobec śmierci, ryzyka samobójczego i żałoby. Publikował m.in. na łamach „Death Studies” i „Omega: Journal of Death and Dying”.

The highest part of mental thought is wisdom, yet it is more than mental thought. Representing completeness and wholeness of thought, wisdom is universally a lofty consideration, and too often we sense that it eludes us. The more we seek it, the more we understand that it comes through experiencing and learning, and brings with it the desire to learn more. It also comes with an ever-deepening connection to others.

This is 15 th in a series of 22 short books, what we call Conscious Look Books, that are conversational in nature, taking full advantage of the reader's lived experience to share what can sometimes be difficult concepts. We live in a world that is tearing itself apart, where people are out of control and wanting to control others, rebelling from years of real and perceived abuse and suppression of thought. Yet, this chaos offers us as a humanity the opportunity to make a giant leap forward. By opening ourselves to ourselves, we are able to fully explore who we are and who we can become. With that exploration comes a glimmer of hope as we begin to reclaim the power of each and every mind developed by the lived human experience! These 22 concepts are part of the learning journey of which we are all a part, the Intelligent Social Change Journey (ISCJ). This is a developmental journey of the body, mind and heart, moving from the heaviness of cause-and-effect linear extrapolations, to the fluidity of co-evolving with our environment, to the lightness of breathing our thought and feelings into reality. Grounded in development of our mental faculties, these are phase changes, each building on and expanding previous learning in our movement toward intelligent activity. These little books share 22 large concepts from the Profundity and Bifurcation of Change (which is written from an academic viewpoint). Each book is independent and includes seven ideas offered for the student of life to help us become the co-creators that we are. These books, available in soft cover from Amazon, support idea exploration, class discussion, other discussion groups or can be used as special occasion gifts.

This article will present the spiritual ethos of the elderly person in the light of Thomas’s thought. I will explore, in addition to Thomas’s more familiar works such as the Summa theologiae, a few lesser-known works, such as his biblical commentaries, in which Thomas, the medieval professor, expresses himself most eloquently. The Bible speaks at length about old age and its significance; Thomas’s biblical commentaries provide direct access to his understanding of these passages. Furthermore, the Summa theologiae was intended to develop a better understanding of the Bible, as we read in the Summa’s prologue.

The author first explains wisdom and its importance to moral philosophy. Secondly, he follows with a consideration of the nature of things and the soul as told by Lucretius. Then he presents a brief summary on St. Thomas understanding of soul and how his faculty psychology is a superior explanation of moral philosophy. The author concludes by showing how Lucretius’ ethical system fails and to attain true happiness we must take up a faculty psychology aimed at virtue and the perfection of the soul, the principle form of the human person.

According to many social commentators and psychologists, our modern high-tech, fast-paced world is becoming increasingly frenzied and fragmented. In a time when we possess more financial wealth, material goods, and technological conveniences than ever before, we suffer from chronic stress and anxiety, information and choice overload, a decrease in perceived happiness, feelings of loss of control, deterioration in interpersonal trust and connectivity, and an epidemic of escalating depression. Of special significance, there are various writers who believe that our conscious sense of the future is narrowing and weakening. We are becoming lost and forlorn in an overpowering present. What is going wrong, and more importantly, what can we do about it?
In this paper, we examine the chaotic and disruptive aspects of our contemporary society, identify its key features, and outline a constructive approach for addressing these problems and improving the quality of our lives and mental well being. This approach proposes that happiness, purpose, and meaning in life, as well as a strong sense of future consciousness, are created through the exercise of a core set of character virtues.

Al-adab al-saghīr has been translated from Pahlavi, and can be regarded as the crossroads of the Iranian and Islamic cultures. Ibn-e Moqafa’a, like other translators of Pahlavi texts, translated texts which were in line with Islamic thoughts from Pahlavi to Arabic. This was warmly welcomed in the Arab world, but they were gradually intertwined with Arabic thoughts and the Iranian roots were forgotten.
In the present paper, the sources for some Iranian thoughts in Ketab- al-adab al-ṣaghīr will be presented. This paper will also signify the deeply rooted Iranian culture in Arabic literary works.

Research indicates that cultures differ in the ways they approach social conflicts, with Japanese being more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony and avoid conflicts than Americans. Such cultural differences have developmental consequences for reasoning about social conflict. We interviewed random samples of Americans from the Midwest in the U.S. and Japanese from the larger Tokyo area about the future developments of intergroup and interpersonal conflicts. Responses showed increased wisdom (e.g. recognition of multiple perspectives, compromise, and the limits of knowledge) with increasing age among Americans, but older age was not associated with wiser responses among Japanese. Younger and middle-aged Japanese showed greater use of wise reasoning strategies than younger and middle-aged Americans. This cultural difference was weaker for older participants for interpersonal conflicts and was actually reversed for intergroup conflicts. Implications of this research for the study of aging, cultural psychology, and wisdom are discussed.

The last 10 years have been a time of experimentation, research and intense discussion in the discipline of Information Visualization. A fundamental notion for this discipline is the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy. Even if at the top of this model, Wisdom is typically put aside: the DIKW has often become DIK. Representing and visualizing Wisdom presents cultural constrains and posed conceptual challenges. This paper presents the results of a three years research on the possible relevance of the DIKW model applied in the context of Communication Graphic Design education. It investigates how the DIKW can provide a relevant framework to help student in understanding the difference between data visualization, information visualization, knowledge visualization and wisdom visualization. Instead of reducing the model to DIK we purposely challenge students to reflect on the concept of Wisdom and experiment on possible ways of visualizing it. Addressing the concept of Wisdom visualization is an attempt to push the boundaries of this discipline toward a deeper understanding of the quality of data we visualize.

This article offers a fresh examination of Mitch Albom's bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) from a perspective of literary age studies, with a special focus on the concept of later-life mentorship. The classic mentor figure, commonly seen as the archetype of a wise old teacher, is revived through the healing power of an end-of-life narrative. The mentorial relationship between a young man and an old man shows that the personal growth is as an ongoing and ageless process of becoming that can lead to wisdom and a better understanding of aging and living-with-dying. It also reveals that later-life narratives of mentorship are an integral part of the transmission of knowledge and humanistic values to establish solid relationships between generations. Life lessons with Morrie, collected in the form of a memoir, provide readers with important tools to learn to accept life in all its dimensions, and show how literary narratives of growing older can help deconstruct negative western notions of old age and lead to more meaningful lives in all life stages.

In this article, I offer a provisional analysis of the philosophical semantics of " wisdom " in the thought of the New Confucian thinker Tang Junyi. I begin by providing some pointers concerning the concept of wisdom in general and situating the discourse on wisdom in comparative philosophy in the context of the later Foucault's and Pierre Hadot's historical investigations into ancient Graeco-Roman philosophy as a mode of spiritual self-cultivation and self-transformation. In the remainder of the paper, I try to describe and think through what Foucault identifies as a " Cartesian moment, " in which self-knowledge becomes the ultimate precondition for the ethico-spiritual project of " caring for the self, " in Tang's approach of wisdom. In the course of my argument, I outline the complex relation between his vision of a renewed Confucian mode of religious practice on the one hand and his philosophical presuppositions concerning the transcendental status of subjectivity and the reflexivity of consciousness on the other. Keywords Tang Junyi, wisdom, New Confucianism, modern Chinese philosophy, transformative knowledge, philosophy as a way of life

If "two are better than one," then many brains will be better than none, right? It is going to seem bizarre and this is not going to go down well with the intellectually proud, but scientists are discovering that microbes without brains can make decisions that are wiser than those made by humans. If finding wisdom in extremely stupid creatures seems odd, bear in mind that locusts do not have much of a brain and yet the Bible mentions them as illustrations of extreme wisdom. Perhaps wisdom is quite different to intelligence as evolutionary psychologists are saying. Used wisely, intelligence is a great blessing from God, but used foolishly, as we will see, it is a terrible curse. These microbes are simple creatures without a brain and with big problems. Their environment is replete with risks. Yet they are able to thrive by assessing and responding appropriately and proportionately. How microbes cope strategically with threats is a wonder of nature. As we unfold how they do it, we will discover what they have that predisposes them to wisdom. We will also discover why it is that humans have a predisposition to poor judgement. We tend to over-react to lesser overt threats such as snakes and under-react to more insidious ones. Many would venture that a blatantly malevolent Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse-tung were the most dangerous individuals of the 20th century. However, we will see that this distinction needs to go to another who is regarded as a hero but who has caused death and suffering on an even more massive scale. He was an extremely intelligent and educated man, but a foolishly reckless one. It is, however, superficial to make him the monstrous culprit behind all the devastation because he himself is the product of insidious forces. His all-consuming faith was not in Christ, but in very toxic ideas that started to gain ground centuries earlier. We will trace those ideas and why it is that they had such terrible consequences. What we need most crucially is wisdom.  We can learn wisdom from microbes, but with our knowledge and intelligence comes the imperative for a special wisdom from the Master. Taking risks is serious even for earthly matters. How much more so for spiritual matters? We will see that knowing the Master himself is the surest path to deep wisdom and abundant and eternal life.

"'Democracy and Leadership: On Pragmatism and Virtue' presents a theory of leadership drawing on insights from Plato’s Republic, while abandoning his authoritarianism in favor of John Dewey’s democratic thought. The book continues the democratic turn for the study of leadership beyond the incorporation of democratic values into old-fashioned views about leading. The completed democratic turn leaves behind the traditional focus on a class of special people. Instead, leadership is understood as a process of judicious yet courageous guidance, infused with democratic values and open to all people.

The book proceeds in three parts, beginning with definitions and an understanding of the nature of leadership in general and of democratic leadership in particular. Then, Part II examines four challenges for a democratic theory of leadership. Finally, in Part III, the book tests the theory of democratic leadership in addressing problems of poverty, educational frustration, and racial divides, particularly aggravated in Mississippi.""

In this article conception of «sofijnist» (wisdom) is analyzed through the prism of Our Lady, local and state order of Kyiv Rus and phenomenon of its sanctity. In the  west European theology the circumstance, that Our Lady is an incarnation of Sofia (wisdom) explains as a special role of woman in the Ukrainian mentality. Special qualities of Our Lady are represented in various hodigitrian icons. The explanation of the notion «sofijnist» in the context of the state and local order of Kyiv Rus is possible through the analysis of Kyiv as the capital of the state Rus, that is also an incarnation of «sofijnist» in the city’s material-spatial environment. The idea of sanctity is linked with the idea of «sofijnist». These ideas are analyzed in the context of life of the KyivPecherskLavraholy persons, which are people’s and state’s intercessors. Kyiv-Pechersk Patericon indicates their main qualities such as painstaking in Christ, misericord and intercession for all who need it.

In Enheduanna’s hymns, Inanna’s title is Lady of All the Me. The Me, translated as ‘godly powers’ or ‘cosmic offices’ also suggests the “delicate balancing of order and disorder.” (QH: 29.) (QH: 19-38; IQ: 11-27; TOD.)

As the holder of the law, Inanna is a prototype of other law keepers and resources including: “the Tao in Chinese philosophy, the Dharma in Indian, Sophia in the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, and the Gnostic Christian tradition,” plus Egyptian Maat of truth and justice who not only rebirths the gods, but “breathes life into the beginning of life.” (MG: 260-63.) Along with the cultivation of grain, Greek goddess Demeter also was known as the law–giver (Thesmophoros). (RC: 233.)

A study on the notion of wisdom in Albertus Magnus based on his commentaries on Eth. Nic.

«La sabiduría en san Alberto Magno» in: "La sabiduría en Tomás de Aquino. Inspiración y reflexión. Perspectivas filosóficas y teológicas", edited by Liliana B. Irizar, Bogotá: Universidad Sergio Arboleda, 2017, ISBN: 978-958-8987-57-6, pp. 33-53.