Intellectual

Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the foremost intellectuals of his time.
Foreign Policy magazine named the lawyer Shirin Ebadi a leading intellectual for her work protecting human rights in Iran.[1]

An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for its normative problems.[2][3] Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by either rejecting, producing or extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.[4]

  1. ^ Amburn, Brad (2009). "The World's Top 20 Public Intellectuals". Foreign Policy. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  2. ^ The New Fontana dictionary of Modern Thought Third Edition, A. Bullock & S. Trombley, Eds. (1999) p. 433.
  3. ^ Jennings, Jeremy and Kemp-Welch, Tony. "The Century of the Intellectual: From Dreyfus to Salman Rushdie", Intellectuals in Politics, Routledge: New York (1997) p. 1.
  4. ^ Ory, Pascal and Sirinelli, Jean-François. Les Intellectuels en France. De l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (The Intellectuals in France: From the Dreyfus Affair to Our Days), Paris: Armand Colin, 2002, p. 10.