I wrote the following six short essays a while ago, and in somewhat of a haste. The haste came from knowing if I were to slow down, I’d not get to the end. There are some things you can do only in a rush, and those things tend not to be very pleasant. In any case, I’d like to return to them soon and see if I can reconsider some of my previous thoughts and…
My friend, Javier Rivera, has posted a video about the relationship between religion and philosophy. Specifically, he talks about the duty of philosophers to ask, “What is religion?” Javier points out the dominant tendency in philosophers to fixate on their own discipline, asking again and again, “What is philosophy?” but a similar kind of (philosophical) attention is rarely devoted to religion. What we need, Javier argues, is a philosophical interest and engagement with religion. Something…
Having a good conversation about a painful topic is bittersweet. Having a good conversation about loss, for instance, has sweetness mixed with the core bitterness of the topic, and I think the sweetness comes from the truth we discover and the understanding we come to share. Even loss–and our attention to loss–can become a way of connecting with others, a way of discovering and sharing insights. A few days ago, I listened to a recent…
In my list of 22 books for the year 2022, Don Quixote was number one. While reading the novel, I also read a little from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote, and I made references to Nabokov on Parts II and III. I enjoyed these livestreams and I’d like to continue doing them, despite the interruptions and disfluencies. I am going to miss Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, after having spent about a month with…
We are working through Fathali Moghaddam’s Great Ideas in Psychology with a group of students. Our next topic (Chapter 4) is “the Freudian Unconscious.” Here I am collecting some of the videos I have posted about Freud and you can watch them in the order they appear below. Feel free to add comments or questions below the page. On Anthony Storr’s Very Short Introduction to Freud On Freud’s Outline of Psychoanalysis On Freud’s Group Psychology…