Intellectualism denotes the use and development of the intellect, the practice of being an intellectual, and of holding intellectual pursuits in great regard. Moreover, in philosophy, “intellectualism” occasionally is synonymous with “rationalism”, i.e. knowledge derived mostly from reason and reasoning. Socially, “intellectualism” negatively connotes: (i) single-mindedness of purpose (“too much attention to thinking”), and (ii) emotional coldness (“the absence of affection and feeling”).

In the view of Socrates (469–399 BC), intellectualism allows that “one will do what is right or best just as soon as one truly understands what is right or best”; that virtue is a purely intellectual matter, since virtue and knowledge are cerebral relatives, which a person accrues and improves with dedication to reason. So defined, Socratic intellectualism became a key philosophic doctrine of Stoicism. The apparent, problematic consequences of this view are “Socratic paradoxes”, such as the view that there is no weakness of will — that no one knowingly does, or seeks to do, evil (moral wrong); that anyone who does, or seeks to do, moral wrong does so involuntarily; and that virtue is knowledge, that there are not many virtues, but that all virtues are one.

David Rieff (pronounced /ˈriːf/; born September 28, 1952, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American polemicist and pundit. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. He has published numerous articles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, El Pais, The New Republic, World Affairs, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and other publications.^{[citation needed]}

Rieff's mother is internationally renowned writer Susan Sontag.^{[citation needed]} His father, whom Sontag married in her teens and divorced in her 20s, was Philip Rieff, author of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.^{[citation needed]}

Rieff was educated at the Lycée Français de New York and attended Amherst College as a member of the class of 1974, where he studied with Benjamin DeMott. He eventually dropped out and went through a vagabond period, during which he labored for the radical Catholic priest Ivan Illich in Mexico and worked as a cab driver. He finally ended up at Princeton University, where he graduated with an A.B. in 1978, and was a Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux from 1978 to 1989, working with such authors as Joseph Brodsky, Elias Canetti, Carlos Fuentes, Alberto Moravia, Les Murray, Philip Roth, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Marguerite Yourcenar.^{[citation needed]}

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest but left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Living on the West Coast, Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not just a religion. Like Aldous Huxley before him, he explored human consciousness in the essay, "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book, The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

Ahmad Rafique Akhtar (born April 15, 1941) is a Sufi Islamic scholar from Pakistan. He is from Gujar Khan. A graduate of Government College, Lahore, he has been associated with teaching for years.

He started the journey of his mental investigation from doubt and denial. The center of attention and the direction of his study and meditation took eight years of his life. He dedicated all his investigation and struggle to find a reason to deny the existence of God.

His thesis was very simple, "If a man commits thousands of mistakes he still remains a human being, but if we find even one mistake of God, He can not be a God."

Books in English language

George Pell AC (born 8 June 1941) is an Australian cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He is the eighth and current Archbishop of Sydney, serving since 2001. He previously served as auxiliary bishop (1987–96) and archbishop (1996–2001) of the Archdiocese of Melbourne. He was created a cardinal in 2003.

Pell was born in Ballarat, Victoria, to George Arthur and Margaret Lillian (née Burke) Pell. His father, a non-practising Anglican whose ancestors were from Leicestershire in England, was a heavyweight boxing champion; his mother was a devout Catholic of Irish descent.^{[page needed]} During World War II, his father served in the Australian Defence Force.^{[page needed]} His sister, Margaret, became a violinist with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. As a child, he underwent 24 operations to remove an abscess in his throat.^{[page needed]}

Pell received his early education at Loreto Convent and at St. Patrick's College, both in his native Ballarat. One of his classmates at St Patrick's was Paul Bongiorno.^{[page needed]} At St Patrick's, Pell played as a ruckman on the first XVIII from 1956 to 1959. He even signed to play with the Richmond Football Club. However, his ambitions later turned to the priesthood. Speaking of his decision to become a priest, Pell once said, "To put it crudely, I feared and suspected and eventually became convinced that God wanted me to do His work, and I was never able to successfully escape that conviction."^{[page needed]}