My re-reading of Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre‘s existentialist classic, for this semester’s independent study on existentialism has now prompted me to blog on it two days in a row. Today, I find myself returning to a question which I had first considered a couple of decades ago during my first reading of Nausea: Was Antoine RoquentinContinue reading “‘Nausea’ And Psychedelia: Was Antoine Roquentin Tripping?”
Category Archives: Psychology
Jean-Paul Sartre On ‘An Odd Moment In The Afternoon’
In Jean-Paul Sartre‘s Nausea, Antoine Roquentin offers us a characteristically morose reflection about a very particular hour of the day: Three o’clock. Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon. Today it is intolerable. [New Directions edition, 2007; pp. 14] Monsieur Roquentin isContinue reading “Jean-Paul Sartre On ‘An Odd Moment In The Afternoon’”
Donald Trump And Organized Labor’s Death Wish
Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi makes note of a distinctive and troubling feature of modern American political life, the seeming death wish of American organized labor: Every four years, some Democrat who’s been a lifelong friend of labor runs for president. And every four years, that Democrat gets thrown over by national labor bossesContinue reading “Donald Trump And Organized Labor’s Death Wish”
Democracy, The ‘Anti-National,’ And The Seditionist
In my essay in The Los Angeles Review of Books on the Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera, currently serving a fifty-five year jail term in Federal prison for seditious conspiracy, I had written: The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 remain a blot on American democracy; John Adams deeply regretted — till the dayContinue reading “Democracy, The ‘Anti-National,’ And The Seditionist”
Tim Parks On Writerly Conformity
At The New York Review of Books blog, Tim Parks writes of the “general and ever increasing anxious desire to receive positive feedback” on writing: It is a situation that leads to…an intensification of conformity, people falling over themselves to be approved of….Announce an article…on Facebook and you can count, as the hours go by,Continue reading “Tim Parks On Writerly Conformity”
Turgenev’s Hamlet And Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man
This semester, I’m running an independent study on existentialism with a pair of students from the English department here at Brooklyn College. Our reading list includes seven novels, four plays, and extracts from several philosophical texts. We kicked off our readings two weeks ago with Dostoyevsky‘s Notes from Underground. Because my students had purchased theContinue reading “Turgenev’s Hamlet And Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man”
Pigliucci And Shaw On The Allegedly Useful Reduction
Massimo Pigliucci critiques the uncritical reductionism that the conflation of philosophy and science brings in its wake, using as a jumping-off point, Tamsin Shaw’s essay in the New York Review of Books, which addresses psychologists’ claims “that human beings are not rational, but rather rationalizing, and that one of the things we rationalize most about isContinue reading “Pigliucci And Shaw On The Allegedly Useful Reduction”
Nietzsche On The Interpersonal Dynamics Of Social Networks
This afternoon, I sat down to read through the portions of Human, All Too Human (Section VI – ‘Man in Society’ or ‘In Relations with Others’) that I had assigned to my Social Philosophy class, and once again, was struck by how acute and perspicuous so many of its aphorisms are–especially when it comes to anticipating theContinue reading “Nietzsche On The Interpersonal Dynamics Of Social Networks”
Bilinguality And Being ‘Different People In Different Languages’
Over at LitHub, Ana Menéndez asks that age-old question ‘Are We Different People in Different Languages,’ and, by way of a partial answer, writes: For me, language was a kind of initiation into multiple realities. For if one language could be certain of a table’s gender and another couldn’t be bothered, then what was trueContinue reading “Bilinguality And Being ‘Different People In Different Languages’”
The Strange Case Of Anna Stubblefield And Facilitated Communication
The word ‘tragedy’ should not be used lightly. But the case of Anna Stubblefield and the young black man called ‘DJ’ calls out for such an appellation: many lives and two families lie ruined at its core. Stated baldly the facts of the case run as follows: a professor of philosophy, aided by, and reliantContinue reading “The Strange Case Of Anna Stubblefield And Facilitated Communication”
Samir Chopra 