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The Varieties of Human Excellence: A History of Mind, a Map of Its Dimensions, and a Framework to Replace Intelligence (Large Print Edition)
Paperback
Publisher Price: $19.99
ISBN13: 9789199163710
Publisher: Jimmy Strobl
Published: Apr 21 2026
Pages: 410
Weight: 1.09
Height: 1.02 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What if intelligence was never one thing?
Fourteen civilisations. Twelve dimensions. One argument.
The Greek tradition distinguished five intellectual virtues and placed practical wisdom at their summit. The Confucian tradition built a thirteen-century examination system around moral character. Indian logicians developed formal logic using a fundamentally different architecture from Aristotle's. Buddhist philosophy insisted that wisdom without compassion is not yet wisdom. The Yoruba tradition distinguished the wisdom of the head from the wisdom of the belly and made character the paramount quality. The Ubuntu tradition challenged whether the individual extracted from relational context is a meaningful unit of analysis. Pacific navigators held entire star compasses in memory across weeks of open-ocean voyaging.
Five civilisations independently developed ideals of the excellent person that integrate cognition with moral character. Three independently developed formal logical systems. Eight or more refused to separate intellectual excellence from ethical formation.
Then, beginning in the nineteenth century, this rich plurality was compressed into a single measurable quantity called IQ.
This book reconstructs what was lost, maps the twelve dimensions of human excellence that the traditions tracked, and proposes a framework to replace the false unity with something adequate to what humanity has actually valued.
It concedes what IQ gets right before arguing that it is incomplete. The incompleteness is structural, not marginal, and it excludes the dimensions most human traditions placed at the centre of their accounts of excellence.
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