#67 – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow

12/09/23 • 64 min

Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi (29 September 1934 – 20 October 2021) was a Hungarian-American psychologist. He recognized and named the psychological concept of "flow," a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. He was the Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. Earlier he served as the head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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#66 – Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian–American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.

In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age."

His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift, and Ravelstein.

Bellow said that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, of Henderson the Rain King, was the one most like himself. Bellow grew up as an immigrant from Quebec. As Christopher Hitchens describes it, Bellow's fiction and principal characters reflect his own yearning for transcendence, a battle "to overcome not just ghetto conditions but also ghetto psychoses." Bellow's protagonists wrestle with what Albert Corde, the dean in The Dean's December, called "the big-scale insanities of the 20th century." This transcendence of the "unutterably dismal" (a phrase from Dangling Man) is achieved, if it can be achieved at all, through a "ferocious assimilation of learning" (Hitchens) and an emphasis on nobility.

Saul Bellow

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undefined - #68 – Michael Polanyi: Full History and Hope Lecture Series – The Destruction of Reality, The Realm of the Unspoken, The Vindication of Realities, and A Society of Explorers

#68 – Michael Polanyi: Full History and Hope Lecture Series – The Destruction of Reality, The Realm of the Unspoken, The Vindication of Realities, and A Society of Explorers

Michael Polanyi (11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing.

His wide-ranging research in physical science included chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and adsorption of gases. He pioneered the theory of fibre diffraction analysis in 1921, and the dislocation theory of plastic deformation of ductile metals and other materials in 1934. He emigrated to Germany, in 1926 becoming a chemistry professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and then in 1933 to England, becoming first a chemistry professor, and then a social sciences professor at the University of Manchester. Two of his pupils won the Nobel Prize, as well as one of his children. In 1944 Polanyi was elected to the Royal Society.

The contributions which Polanyi made to the social sciences include the concept of a polycentric spontaneous order and his rejection of a value neutral conception of liberty. They were developed in the context of his opposition to central planning.

Michael Polanyi

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