Enjoying the view from Limbo
A serious student whose enthusiasm for classic literature decidedly tends toward Jane Austen and Plato — toward a reality in which life’s dark shadows eventually give way to the bright sunlight of understanding, or at least to the enlightening glow of irony — wrote to me to express her frustration at being unable to find the greatness in Dostoevsky, in spite of having...
A psychiatrist named Mark Horowitz is making waves these days by publishing research indicating that there is in fact no substantial scientific evidence showing that ordinary human depression, for which hundreds of millions of people around the world are taking powerful prescription medication, has any connection to the supposed chemical imbalance in the brain for which the standard “antidepressant” medicine is alleged to...
Throughout my teaching life, I have naturally had many opportunities to counsel students who were looking for some guidance on personal matters — typically, given my philosophic character, matters of a “big picture” nature, rather than passing practical concerns. The most interesting and enriching of such opportunities, from my perspective, are usually those in which the student’s problems are more fundamentally spiritual, his...
The fantasy that someday everything we now call “mind” or “soul” will be explained by physical causation is the crux of the modern scientific materialist dream, and means nothing less, in theory and in practice, than the literal annihilation of the human race as a species of living beings who experience and think.
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 15, 2018 · Last modified November 18, 2018
In my recent piece, “On Freud,” I said of the “father of modern psychology”: He saw his theory as a more scientific version of Plato’s tripartite soul. He was in fact Plato for auto-mechanics. And for all his titillating and supposedly shocking nonsense about sex, he was oblivious to Eros, which is the specifically human manifestation of sexuality, and the key to mankind’s...
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