Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Lorraine Besser. Lorraine is a philosopher, author, and professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. In this post, Lorraine addresses the topic of boredom. Lorraine Besser   Boredom. We’ve all experienced it and we all want to avoid it. But wait: isn’t it sometimes good to be bored? My answer is no , and that the very asking of this question reveals the ambiguous nature of the concept as it is used in ordinary discourse. This ambiguity is dangerous: because boredom is inherently bad, yet also quite natural for us to experience, it’s important to know how to alleviate it. Yet, we can’t begin to understand how to alleviate it unless we are clearer on what boredom is. Most often, when someone claims that boredom is sometimes good, what they mean is that it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest, and for us to experience the peaceful, calming nature of a mind at rest. Without question, it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest. A restful mind, however,...

This post is by David Ludwig (Wageningen University, Netherlands) and Charbel N. El-Hani (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil) whose open access book Transformative Transdisciplinarity. An Introduction to Community-Based Philosophy has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Specialization is inevitable in academia. Becoming an academic often means becoming a specialist in a narrowly defined research area that is carefully sheltered from too much outside influence. While this division of epistemic labor is central to disciplinary progress, it clashes with the reality of complex socio-ecological crises. Issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change, economic exploitation, or public health are not technical problems that can be solved by a specialist with narrowly defined expertise but require collaboration across disciplines, synthesizing insights from distinct fields such as biological and Earth sciences as well as economics and policy studies.  While interdiscipl...