An intellectual or a thinker is a person who primarily uses intelligence in either a professional or an individual capacity. As a substantive or adjective, it refers to the work product of such persons, to the so-called “life of the mind” generally, or to an aspect of something where learning, erudition, and informed and critical thinking are the focus, as in “the intellectual level of the discourse on the matter was not high”. The intellectual is a specific variety of the intelligent, which unlike the general property, is strictly associated with reason and thinking. Many everyday roles require the application of intelligence to skills that may have a psychomotor component, for example, in the fields of medicine, sport or the arts, but these do not necessarily involve the practitioner in the “world of ideas”. The distinctive quality of the intellectual person is that the mental skills he or she demonstrates are not simply intelligent, they focus on thinking about the abstract, philosophical and esoteric aspects of human inquiry and the value of their thinking. Traditionally, the scholarly and the intellectual classes were closely identified; however, while an intellectual need not necessarily be actively involved in scholarship, he or she may have an academic background and will typically have an association with a profession. In some contexts, especially in journalism, ‘intellectual’ generally denotes academics of the humanities — especially philosophy — who speak about important social and political matters; by definition, the public intellectuals who communicate the theoretic base for resolving public problems; generally, academics remain in their areas of expertise, whereas intellectuals apply academic knowledge and abstraction to public problems. The sociologist Frank Furedi said that ‘Intellectuals are not defined according to the jobs they do, but [by] the manner in which they act, the way they see themselves, and the values that they uphold’; they usually arise from the educated élite, although the North American usage of ‘intellectual’ includes them to the ‘academics’. Convergence with, and participation in, open, contemporary public debate separates intellectuals from academics; by venturing from academic specialism to address the public, the academic becomes a public intellectual. Generally, ‘intellectual’ is a label more often applied to public debate-participants from the fields of culture, the arts, and the social sciences, including the law, than to the men and women working in the natural sciences, the applied sciences, mathematics, and engineering.
