Protecting Identity

By JohnR |

We don’t just live in our minds.  We also don’t just live in a world with other people.  We live with the need to have the world in our mind fit with the world of other people, and the shape our life takes is determined by how these two mesh. At one level, this need […]

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A Sensitive Matter

By JohnR |

Hurting another person is a very easy thing to do. We often think of “hurt” in terms of the pain induced by bodily injury.  This obviously is an important kind of hurt, but we should be careful to construe it rightly.  The harm is done to the body, but the hurt is a matter of […]

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Making Our Way

By JohnR |

In one of my favourite passages in Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that he likes to talk with old people because “they are like men who have proceeded on a certain road that perhaps we too will have to take.”  (I.328e) There are many aspects of this remark that would be worth exploring, but I am […]

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Beginning.

By JohnR |

Apocalypse Now! begins with Jim Morrison singing “This is the end.”  The 19th Century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel begins his Science of Logic with an essay called “What What Must the Science Begin?” and there, similarly, it seems to me that, in some ways, his answer is that it is only with the end that […]

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