The Vital Distinction Between Intellectual And Academic

A person is a talented intellectual if he or she engages in or emphasizes the sound use of the intellect: that is, the use of the intellect in accordance with the laws of logic.  To analyze concepts, necessary truths, and one's experiences without using any non sequiturs is to possess intellectual adeptness.  Because no one needs to interact with other people or their writings in order to reason, the quality of one's intellect has nothing to do with familiarity with academia or the very existence of academia.

All logical truths are accessible by all beings that can grasp reason itself, meaning that sincerely looking to academia for philosophical help is often a waste of time for two foundational reasons.  First of all, published writings and lectures usually contain a plethora of fallacies and ignore many logical facts, making them useless except when they serve as examples of how not to reason. Second, looking to academia is completely gratuitous at best since consulting reason removes the need to read scholars to evaluate all foundational philosophical concepts to begin with.

Moreover, there are many important logical facts that have been completely or almost completely ignored by academia [1], often because of their admittedly esoteric and extremely precise or controversial nature.  That conscience cannot reveal knowledge of morality and that one must make no assumptions in order to have an accurate and sound worldview, for instance, are extraordinarily basic facts that have been largely ignored by academia.  One of the aforementioned flaws is enough to render academia a triviality at most, but the combination is devastating for academia.

Even the fact that logic allows each individual to grasp necessary truths without the need for other people alone, however, means that no one needs to be an academic to be an intellectual.  There is a vital distinction that must be made between the words intellectual and academic, for there is no necessary overlap between the concepts each word refers to.  Even when academia's accumulated delusions are ignored, reason completely dissolves any basis for treating academia as anything other than an unnecessary stop on the road to knowledge of logical truths.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-list-of-neglected-truths.html