Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with her readers was a mutually demanding collaboration. Why did I write all of this to you? Because I have never felt such a human closeness as I do with you, Madame, whose writing can express the whole gamut of emotions. — from a 1972 letter to Simone de Beauvoir In the fall […]
Neuroscience has much to learn from Hume’s philosophy of emotions
we can’t tell ourselves whom to fall in love with – means that our wrestling with the passions is what brings the self into being. Habits consolidate what control we can have of our passions. Hume gives habit pride of place in his moral accounting, but the key here is to continually assess whether we […]
The Weakness of the Furies
Victim anger can be useful to the political struggle, but it can also become excessive and obsessive, deforming the self. We need to address the future, and for that we need an uncertain trust and a radical type of love. Thus did every type of bad practice take root in Greece, fed by these civil […]
Buddhism and self-deception
How can I logically manage to deceive myself? Buddhist thought offers a way out of the philosophical paradox Ironically, then, Buddhists are inclined to see belief in a single substantial self as the severest, most dangerous instance of self-deception. This immediately raises the question: if there is no-self, who can be the subject of self-deceit? […]
Digital Identity Is Broken. Here’s a Way to Fix It
The bedrock of trust is a human community with frequent positive interactions – The Entangled Social Self. Most people today suffer from a strange sort of psychosis: we are uncertain of our identity. For although we are (mostly) certain of who we are in our own minds, the identity we use to interact with the […]
