This paper argues that Spinoza’s concept of active joy provides a philosophical grounding for contemporary theory of serious leisure. For Spinoza, active joy is a sustained increase in our power of acting, achieved through activities rooted in understanding, autonomy, and rational self‑cultivation. This paper cites empirical evidence from the current leisure studies scholarship and explains how such joy emerges when we engage in practices that systematically expand our capacities and align with our conatus. The term “serious leisure”, defined as the committed, skill‑based, identity‑forming pursuit of a chosen activity, mirrors this structure. Both frameworks emphasise disciplined engagement and the transformation of ordinary pursuits into personal flourishing. By interpreting serious leisure through Spinoza’s lens, this paper shows how amateurism, volunteerism and hobbies generate active joy by enhancing competence, agency, and social embeddedness. The paper also illustrates that Spinoza’s philosophy clarifies why serious leisure contributes to resilience and wellbeing. Consequently, the sustained engagement in serious leisure embodies a Spinozist pathway toward freedom, where joy emerges from the rational understanding of our potential within a structured yet intrinsically rewarding domain of activity.
Debates about Generative AI often focus on empirical claims concerning cognitive enhancement or decline. This paper argues that the deeper issue is aesthetic. AI reshapes the form, tempo, and structural movement of reflective thought. Drawing on multi-modal critical thinking framework (Gilbert, 1994) and a conception of improvisational thinking as the aesthetic mode of dialectical engagement (Yazici, 2025), I defend a middle-way position. Generative AI threatens thinking only when engaged passively, encouraging aesthetic flattening through premature closure and conceptual smoothness. When approached through an improvisational stance, however, AI-generated outputs become material for reinterpretation, resistance, and creative transformation. The impact of AI on human thought is therefore not technologically determined but dependent on the aesthetic posture of the thinker. The philosophical task in an AI age is to cultivate forms of engagement that preserve the open-ended, self-revising thus improvisational ways of thinking.
The rise of critical thinking in Greece’s early philosophy can be traced back to the earliest written literature of ancient Greece, with the works of the epic poets Hesiod and Homer. Critical thinking was not just limited to the logical philosophies of Plato and Aristotle of the classical age, nor with interpretation to the sixth century BCE natural philosophers’ empirical observations and theories.Through a comparative analysis of the themes and structures surrounding concepts of creation in the myths of Greece’s epic poems, with the theories of the early Presocratic natural philosophers, this paper proposes to pinpoint when ancient Greece’s formal critical reasoning began. It argues the Presocratic philosophers were the transition point from mythological thinking of Greece’s archaic age to the scientific reasoning of Greece’s classical age. However, the earlier epic poetry also employed this critical reasoning, which makes it Greece’s earliest instance of recorded critical reasoning. Both mediums of epic poetry and natural philosophy used critical reasoning to explain natural phenomena and justify human existence. Thus the early Greek thinkers employed critical reasoning in what were early quasi-scientific explanations for what they observed around them that were based on empirical observation and practice combined with logic and reasoning.
Tolerance is firmly established in political, religious, and legal contexts, yet in the sphere of belief its boundaries remain undefined. In matters of opinion, no legal obligation requires individuals to justify or defend their claims. For that reason, the task of setting limits falls to critical thinking. It safeguards the conditions under which knowledge can be distinguished from mere opinion and responsible judgment from arbitrary assertion. An epistemic community endures only where practices of verification, argumentation, and reason-giving are preserved. Institutions do not think or tolerate on their own, but they shape the environment in which justification is either encouraged or replaced by unchecked expression. Tolerance should be understood as a starting assumption rather than a final value. It reflects a willingness to acknowledge the existence of the other. Critical thinking, however, asks a further question: is a given position genuinely different, grounded in a distinct but coherent conceptual framework, or is it simply false within a shared one? What is truly other may resist direct comparison and require broader criteria of evaluation. What is false demands critical rejection. Failing to distinguish between these cases erodes standards of judgment. The spread of fake information makes this risk visible. The problem is not openness to difference, but the elevation of error to the status of a legitimate alternative.
How does wishful thinking (the ‘desirability bias’) work? Existing theories (e.g., cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, psychological immune theory) struggle to adequately explain this phenomenon, so I apply theory construction methodology and standard critical thinking tools to improve on them. I find that wishful thinkers accurately perceive that attaining self-serving beliefs will confer genuine benefits to them, but underperceive their potential costs, leading to a distorted perception of the true personal benefit-cost ratio (BCR). Wishful thinkers must also maintain their beliefs over time, which they achieve with the strategic avoidance of doubt-inducing stimuli (even though this strategy has fundamental constraints). I posit that wishful thinking necessarily produces an aversive attitude towards self-doubt, and that such doubt aversion is a crucial causal factor: the overperception of the BCR of wishful thinking is locked in by it, as it obstructs future learning about costs. All of this produces serious risks for the wishful thinker, but they may reduce their exposure to these by developing conditional metacognitive knowledge about self-doubt. Unfortunately, doubt aversion can again obstruct this process. My main contention is that without the metacognitive neglect (i.e., the failure to develop metacognitive knowledge) of self-doubt and doubt aversion, wishful thinking could not be sustained.
With global reports of substantial mental health issues, there is an imperative to take seriously the criticisms of the traditional Western paradigm that entails the predominant epistemological and ontological assumptions about mental health. In this paper we argue that the historical development of concepts and theories related to self have created deeply embedded cultural legacies that are based on the ontological and epistemological assumptions of our individual and societal expectations about, and experiences of, wellbeing. Further, we will argue that ontological and epistemological assumptions in the Western paradigm concerning a fundamental ontological separation of selves from the world and of an intra-psychic divide mean that the way that the self is understood in relation to the experience of wellbeing is conceptually flawed. These embedded assumptions are demonstrated to be problematic by framing them in the double-bind scenario, whereby contradictory inputs create an irresolvable situation causing anxiety and confusion. Understanding the web of ontological and epistemological tangles and their consequent conceptual and lived ‘binds’ provides a framework within which to consider a paradigm shift in understanding the self in relation to critical thinking and the experience of wellbeing.
In this presentation, I critically evaluate the popular use of slippery slope arguments (SSAs) by opponents of Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD). I begin by evaluating different forms of SSA. I then identify recurrent methodological deficiencies appearing in SSAs opposing VAD, such as speculative causal chains of events, conflation of logical possibility with empirical probability, selective engagement with jurisdictional evidence, and the application of an asymmetric burden of proof that treats hypothetical future harms as certain or very likely, while down-playing, and sometimes even ignoring, the proven immediate suffering of VAD patients. Drawing on case studies from the philosophical literature, and legislative debates from jurisdictions where VAD has been permitted, I demonstrate that slippage toward the negative consequences predicted by opponents of VAD either have not occurred or have occurred in ways reflective of deliberative democratic debate, and clinical review. Further, I argue that the rhetorical force of SSAs, used in debates about VAD, often effectively conceals deeply held theological commitments (such as the sanctity of life) that advocates are reluctant to defend directly. I conclude by advocating for ways to distinguish legitimate SSAs from fallacious ones.
Group deliberation is a discursive process whereby participants seek to reach understanding by exchanging considerations, aiming to build consensus for the purpose of action-coordination. My PhD thesis develops formal (mathematical) models to study the mechanics of group deliberation. In this talk, I first address the question of whether formal models are appropriate to study group deliberation in the first place. On Jürgen Habermas' influential theory of communicative action, formal models are inappropriate to study processes of communicative action (such as deliberation), because they model agents as engaging in purposive strategic action, rather than as acting so as to reach understanding. I develop a concept, deliberative strategic action, and argue that it provides a conceptual warrant to study deliberation using formal models. An agent engaged in deliberative strategic action relies on purposive rationality to carry out a plan of action for the end of reaching understanding. Second, I present a framework, objects of deliberation. Here, deliberating agents seek consensus on one or more parts of a hypothetical imperative: ends, means, or facts. I argue that this framework helps us make sense of the diversity of formal models of deliberation.
