Kwame Anthony Appiah writes: I want to make the case for the power of thinking in the third person. The first person, of course, comes quite naturally to us. We have a vivid sense of our experiences and perspectives: This is who and what I am. People will live their lives with “main character energy.” Yet, with a little more work, we can also view ourselves the way historians and social scientists might: as creatures shaped by larger forces and…
Ryan A Bush writes: In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche published The Gay Science, a work he referred to as ‘the most personal of all my books’. It came after a series of setbacks in his life, including the weak reception of his previous work, a soured friendship, and his declining health, which caused severe migraines and vomiting, forcing him to resign from his professorial position. Yet it strikes a surprisingly cheerful tone. It’s in this book that the philosopher first penned the…
Kathleen Wallace writes: Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us. Socrates thought…
Kathleen Wallace writes: Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us. Socrates thought…
Kate Kirkpatrick writes: The desires to love and be loved are, on Simone de Beauvoir’s view, part of the structure of human existence. Often, they go awry. But even so, she claimed, authentic love is not only possible but one of the most powerful tools available to individuals who want to be free. So what, exactly, is this authentic love? In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir argued that culture led men and women to have asymmetrical expectations, with the result…
By Abeba Birhane According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in African Religions and Philosophy (1975): ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’…
Natalie Wolchover writes: In his 1890 opus, The Principles of Psychology, William James invoked Romeo and Juliet to illustrate what makes conscious beings so different from the particles that make them up. “Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they,” James wrote. “But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite…