The Seba library treats Tool in 9 passages, across 5 authors (including Hillman, James, Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Harris, Russ).
Tools, too, belong to Gods. All instruments have a life beyond our modern technological fantasy of tools as cold, passive implements. An ideational tool may possess its possessor, turning all events into the shape and likeness of the tool.
Hillman argues that psychic tools—ideas used to ‘see through’ phenomena—are not inert but animated, capable of enslaving their user by literalizing every experience through the tool’s own narrow form.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
the tool, when directly manipulated by man, is still an extension of his own organs. The organon transmits and amplifies man’s force, rather than acting by virtue of its own internal structure. When used, the tool adapts itself to the body’s own rhythms. It operates within a human time scale.
Vernant locates the Greek organon within a ‘technology of the body,’ distinguishing it fundamentally from machine-based technology and situating it within an anthropocentric cosmology.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
Being thus subject to others and directed toward an end that is beyond it, how could the poiesis of the artisan possibly be considered a true type of action? In order to distinguish it from genuine activity, praxis, Aristotle calls it a mere movement: kinesis.
Vernant shows that for Aristotle the artisan and his tools are subordinated to the user’s knowledge of the ‘form,’ reducing craft to kinesis rather than genuine praxis.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
I want to introduce you to my all-time-favorite ACT tool, which brings them all together in an easy-to-understand and simple-to-use format. Welcome to the Choice Point.
Harris uses ‘tool’ in its purely pragmatic clinical sense, designating the choice-point diagram as an integrative instrument for organizing the six ACT processes.
, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting
The program’s craving tool involves a mindful smoking exercise designed to help people become more fully aware of the phenomenological qualities experienced during and after smoking.
Taylor operationalizes ‘tool’ as a structured behavioral intervention that disrupts habitual reward-learning cycles through mindful attention to somatic experience.
, App-Based Mindfulness Training Predicts Reductions in Smoking Behavior by Engaging Reinforcement Learning Mechanisms: A Preliminary Naturalistic Single-Arm Study, 2022supporting
operated by decreasing the expected reward value of smoking across uses of the craving tool. Moreover, we showed that decreased expected reward value predicted reduced present-moment reward value on the subsequent use of the craving tool.
The craving tool is shown to function mechanistically by progressively devaluing the reward representation of smoking through repeated mindful engagement.
, App-Based Mindfulness Training Predicts Reductions in Smoking Behavior by Engaging Reinforcement Learning Mechanisms: A Preliminary Naturalistic Single-Arm Study, 2022supporting
both expected reward values and present-moment reward values can be assessed to determine the correspondence between these two constructs and if they were influenced in the same way by the use of the mindful smoking craving tool.
Taylor frames the craving tool as producing measurable changes across two distinct reward-valuation registers, grounding the clinical instrument in reinforcement-learning theory.
, App-Based Mindfulness Training Predicts Reductions in Smoking Behavior by Engaging Reinforcement Learning Mechanisms: A Preliminary Naturalistic Single-Arm Study, 2022supporting
In the Greek value system, contemplation, the liberal life of leisure, and nature were prized over their opposites, the disparaged categories of the practical, the useful, servile labor, and the artificial.
Vernant identifies the ideological devaluation of instrumental technology in Greek culture as one structural obstacle to the development of tool-based scientific thought.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside
we developed a Python-based tool to find stimuli distributed across social media platform using breadth-first search algorithm.
Schoeller deploys ‘tool’ unreflectively as a computational search instrument, marking the purely methodological end of the spectrum in the corpus’s usage.
, ChillsDB: A Gold Standard for Aesthetic Chills Stimuli, 2023aside