In Reply to: Re: Critical intelligence posted by miguel on September 23, 2004 at 19:43:46:
No need to apologize. I wasn't offended, I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't really coming at this subject from an academic point of view, but a personal one.
The concerns you raise about Kurtz's ideas might be true of his other writings, I don't know, I haven't read them. But in this book he discusses very little about theories of intelligence, and there is nothing he says that suggests he is creating classes of people based on intelligence or that, as you suggest, he believes that only intellectual elitists possess the appropriate intelligence. He does identify over 20 different kinds, or aspects of intelligence, but no where does he suggest that one is better than the other. For him, the focus in this book is on the adverb/adjective "critical" and how we apply our intelligence. This is an important focus for me, because I realize now that even at 16 I had above average intelligence (generally speaking), yet I had virtually undeveloped critical thinking skills. That, I believe, was a direct cause of me getting involved with the TF. Perhaps if someone had had the intelligence to show me Bertrand Russell's famous essay "Why I Am Not a Christian", for example, my critical intelligence would have instinctively kicked in and I would've thought twice or thrice before making the rash decision I did. But they didn't, I got sucked in, and the rest, as they say, is history.