| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
| Contents | ||
The man of letters stood in many cultures for what we might take to be the contemporary intellectual; the distinction not having great weight when literacy was not fairly universal (and, incidentally, not assumed of a woman). Men of letters are also termed literati (from the Latin), as a group; literatus, in the singular, is hardly used in English.
From that time onwards, in Europe and elsewhere, some variants of the idea of an intellectual class have been important (not least to intellectuals, self-styled). The degrees of actual involvement in art, or politicsPolitics is the process and method of decision-making for groups of human beings. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions including corporate, academic, and religious. Political science is, journalism and educationEducation encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, good judgement and wisdom. One of the fundamental goals of education is to impart culture across the generations (, of nationalist or internationalist or ethnic sentiment, constituting the 'vocation' of an intellectual, have never become fixed. Some intellectuals have been vehemently anti-academic; at times universities and their professoriat have been synonymous with intellectualism, but in other periods and some places the centre of gravity of intellectual life has been elsewhere.
One can notice a sharpening of terms, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Just as the coinage scientistA scientist is a person who is expert in an area of science and who uses scientific methods in research. Traditionally mathematics has been grouped with the sciences, but in modern times people tend not to regard mathematicians as scientists. Mathematical would come to mean a professional, the man of letters would more often be assumed to be a professional writer, perhaps having the breadth of a journalistA journalist is a person who practices journalism that is, who creates reports as a profession for broadcast or publication in mass media such as newspapers, television, radio, magazines, documentary film, and the Internet. Origin and scope of the term In or essayist, but not necessarily with the engagement of the intellectual.