This chapter asks what it is about “intelligence” (nous) that, in Aristotle’s view, makes “understanding” or “insight” (noēsis) its proprietary work. It argues that the answer lies in the peculiar clarity and distinctness of that activity. This clarity and distinctness, it argues, make intelligence the very “form” or “measure” of its objects – what they all “have in common,” what “makes” them intelligible, what their intelligibility consists in.

This chapter shows how Templer recognised that the MCP’s October 1951 Resolutions had shifted the strategic initiative to government, but also that it had increased the importance of winning ‘hearts and minds’. It shows how he increased both punishment and reward, and resettlement amenities and training to secure kills, until late in his term, but above all optimised the government, military and committee system, and the policy towards Orang Asli and the jungle. He created a better system and learning organisation, which in turn started to experiment with the big combined food control–Special Branch–military operations that would start to clear communist committees out of one area after another. The next chapter shows how that learning took off over 1953–4, providing a solution to the problem Briggs had not cracked: how to ‘clear’ areas. Rejecting both hagiographic and hateful accounts of Templer, it reveals the truth about the man, and about the perfecting of Malaya’s counterinsurgency apparatus and the constant refining of its recipe of ingredients.

Aristotle maintains that defining "intelligence" (nous) requires first defining its activity, “understanding” or “insight” (noēsis) which requires first having considered its objects, intelligible beings (noēta). This chapter is about the nature of these objects: what about them makes them intelligible? My principal proposals are that what makes them intelligible is that they are "separate" and "unmixed," and that because, insofar as they are intelligible, they are, in their essence, "activity."’ I am aware this makes it sound as though Aristotle takes intelligibility to consist in some kind of intelligence. But in fact this is a result he is committed to, by the doctrines that intelligence is intelligible and that there is something that intelligible objects "all are in common"; for the alternative, as he himself says, is to suppose that intelligence "will have something mixed-in, which makes it intelligible just like the rest." The challenge, then, is not to steer clear of this result, but to make sense of it. My proposal is that the key to this lies in realizing that and why Aristotle thinks of intelligibility as a creature of intelligence.

Although the development of creativity is an oft-stated goal for students, it is seldom infused into school curricula, nor are teachers explicitly trained on how to promote it within their classrooms, even in the context of selective programs. We have several goals for this chapter. The first is to describe our view of the current status of creativity education for advanced pre-university students, noting its minimal presence except in artistic domains. Second, we differentiate the concepts of gifted education and talent development, favoring the latter as the direction of the future for enhancing the role of creativity. Third, we address some challenges for applying creativity in the gifted and talented classroom.

This chapter reviews theoretical and empirical relationships between wisdom and aspects of intelligence, personality, emotions and well-being, and value orientations. Relationships between wisdom and other psychological characteristics vary considerably by wisdom measure. On average, wise people tend to be somewhat more intelligent than not-so-wise people. They also tend to be more open to new experiences and ideas. Wise people are generally quite happy with their lives, although there are many people who are happy without also being wise. Wise people care more than other people about self-direction and a common good.

The study of convergent cognitive evolution aims to understand how similarities in physical and social intelligence emerge in evolutionarily distant species. This field, which is relatively new, has focused on a number of taxa, including nonhuman primates, corvids, and other birds, cetaceans, canids, and elephants. In this chapter, we highlight the social minds of elephants in particular, with a review of existing observational and experimental research. Investigations of the proximate mechanisms that underlie social behavior require an understanding of how an animal "sees," "hears," "touches,"and "smells" its world. Thus, we emphasize the need to take elephants’ sensory perspective into account when investigating their cognition, especially considering their exceptional olfactory and acoustic senses. We briefly review the literature on elephant social cognition, and discuss the relevance of such research to elephant conservation.

Describes growing human health issues linked to exposure to a multiplicity of chemicals and mixtures. Impacts on the human brain, intelligence and mental disorders, autism, ADHD, depression, child and adult cancers, developmental diseases of children, sexual, gender and reproductive disorders, obesity and diabetes, ‘mystery’ disorders, re-emergence of ‘old’ conditions. The epigenetic curse. The case for precaution.

Chapter 6 will move the discussion from what obligations states have under IHRL to how states have to act in order to fulfil these obligations in practice. This chapter tests state practice against the human rights framework in order to evaluate whether states comply with their human rights obligations when they deal with hostage-taking. By drawing on a wide range of practice by states which have experienced terrorist attacks over the years as well as counter-piracy measures adopted by various states, this chapter seeks to improve our understanding of what states do in response to hostage-taking and how they can better incorporate the needs of hostages in their responses.

This chapter returns to the question of Steinbeck’s purported failures as a writer by arguing that his novel Of Mice and Men--a book often taught at the middle-school level--is an experimental work that offers a partial alternative to high modernism’s interest in characters with mental disabilities. The novel’s undeveloped themes, clunky characterization, brutal melodrama, sweeping determinism, and easy sentimentalism originate in a curious fact about the book’s genre: Steinbeck intended it as a “novel to be played”--performed as drama in the theater. The book has an uncanny duality, placing readers both in a novel and in a would-be stage performance, whereby characters are also actors, objects also props, spaces also stage sets. Like Lennie, the character with mental disabilities at the center, the novel is formally “disabled” and behaves in ways not unlike Samuel Beckett’s modernist plays, defined by a failure to signify and mean. Comparing the novel-as-play with the actual three-act play version that Steinbeck wrote later, we also see the limits of the argument for a “modernist” Steinbeck, as the book’s aesthetic failures create a novel that does not fully develop as a literary work.

Aristotle wrote extensively about the character and behavior of non-human animals in his Historia Animalium. One aspect of character is cognitive abilities. The chapter sets out Aristotle’s views on the cognitive abilities of animals, evidenced also in other works such as the Metaphysics and De Anima. All animals perceive but many also have imagination, memory, and practical intelligence. For Aristotle nonhuman animals have a sort of practical intelligence suited to their particular ways of life. The considerable overlap in cognitive abilities between human and nonhuman animals allows Aristotle to establish a biological basis for many human traits. Many nonhuman animals not only manage to organize their lives and negotiate new challenges but also maintain relationships with each other over extended periods. Social relationships require complex communication and involve a very important type of intelligence which is perfected in the most political of animals, human beings. The chapter ends with an account of how human cognition differs from that which occurs in other animals.