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This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

What's Changing? - Ideas

Ideas

 

Please see below selected recent ideas-related change.

 

See below:

 

February 2023

  • The FT noted that, in the past half century, the number of business schools, faculty and academic publications has mushroomed. One estimate, from the business school accreditation body AACSB, suggests their total research activities cost almost US$4bn a year. Yet these research findings often don’t penetrate far from academic journals into what might be considered their target market: senior leaders in business, government and other organisations beyond their authors’ universities. There is therefore a growing discussion, both inside and outside business schools, about how far research output ought to be measured by the reach of ideas that are taken up in practice.

 

January 2023

 

December 2022

 

June 2022

 

May 2022

  • Philosopher Karl Popper identified three distinct, interrelated worlds. The first two are widely recognised: ‘world 1’ is the outer world of material phenomena, whereas ‘world 2’ is our inner subjective world of qualia (ie, thoughts, feelings, etc). In his Tanner Lecture on Human Values in 1978, to these Popper added a third conceptual world, made up of products of the human mind, such as languages; tales and stories and religious myths; scientific conjectures or theories, and mathematical constructions; songs and symphonies; paintings and sculptures.

 

April 2022

  • In philosophy, the term realism refers to the position that there is a world out there independent of us. The world is made of stuff with its own inherent properties that can be known in and of themselves. Science offers the means for determining those properties. The term is often contrasted with idealism, which states that only some version of “mind” really exists

 

March 2022

  • In The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale, economist and author John A. List explored the common characteristics of scalable ideas, and why some seemingly great ideas fail to take off. List explained the cognitive biases that play a role in allowing bad ideas to scale. Such cognitive biases can lead us to ignore or misinterpret accurate data, putting us at risk of subscribing to bad ideas.

 

December 2021

 

July 2021

  • Asking what sorts of thought are most important in a world emerging from a pandemic, Prospect presented the world’s top 50 thinkers for this moment. Its criteria were not only originality and eminence within a field, but the singular pursuit of an identifiable idea and an ability to gain traction for it. They also insisted on some form of “intervention” - be it a book, speech or a public stand - over the past 12 months. 
  • The concepts of knowledge, truth or justice appear to have been important enough to emerge across different cultures and endure over the ages. But why did we ever come to think in these unpractical terms? Matthieu Queloz, a member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, argued that to understand how our loftiest abstractions earn their keep, we need to trace them to their practical origins. “There are two fundamental difficulties in answering these questions. One is that, just because the concepts of knowledge, truth or justice are as old and ubiquitous as they are, there’s no particular moment in the historical record to which we could turn to find out why they were originally introduced. Wherever we look, people always had these concepts already.”

 

June 2021

  • Ideologies take time to develop and are vital to individuals and society alike. Despite the adverse reaction that many have towards the very idea of ideology, it may an unavoidable aspect of the world. The dramatic rise in the power and prevalence of technology over the past three decades has challenged ideologies and the very nature of how society operates. In a far-reaching article, author Nicolas Villarreal argued that we need “new epistemologies”, capable of encompassing the old, but more appropriate for our present condition.

 

December 2020

 

August 2020

 

March 2020

  • Will China’s rise as a global economic power be accompanied by a global shift in ideologies? Are Western ideas the path to progress and growth, or a hangover from colonial dominance? Is the global community rightly sceptical about China’s ideological superiority, or will Daoism and Confucianism become increasingly influential around the world? Oxford professor of China Studies Vivienne Shue, political philosopher Jamie Whyte and author of How The World Thinks Julian Baggini joined China Dialogue's Isabel Hilton at the Insititute of Ideas to consider China’s influence on the future of thought.

 

December 2018

  • The School of Life noted that many of the world’s finest thinkers have equated ideas with winged creatures. Plato compared the mind to a large cage in which a number of birds – or ideas – will be circulating. He added that we can only catch these birds when they are sitting on a perch, but that they spend much of their time agitatedly racing from one end of the cage to the other. Great ideas may pass through our minds and yet it is quite another matter – as Plato knew – to persuade them to land in them. For Vladimir Nabokov, ideas were like butterflies - and the talented thinker, like a skilful lepidopterist (which Nabokov also happened to be), must learn to lie patiently in wait until they can be coaxed into flying into the net of awareness.

 

September 2018

 

August 2018

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