Debbie Foster

The phenomena that interested Romantic philosophers might appear somewhat arbitrary. Mental illness, ghosts, animal behaviour? But anomalous and exceptional phenomena can be thought of as a point of weakness between the perceived material world and something greater beyond.

The axioms are about essential properties of experience. Many articles and my last book have dealt with these, so I will be brief.

The first axiom is intrinsicality. This means that any experience is subjective, existing for itself, not for others. It exists from the intrinsic perspective, from within, not from an outsider's perspective.

The second

For most of my life, I believed that this atomized, powerfully powerless tranquility was the ideal state.

If the United States' Cold War propaganda efforts have receded so far into the past as to be meaningless to us today, then it remains remarkable that we still believe basically everything they said.

we can enlarge and enrich experience by recognizing how Greek authors, prior to modern science, represented the thing that is both closest to us and yet is still, in some sense, quite mysterious—our own essence as a human self. Many of their ideas are utterly remote from the individualistic and secular contexts of our body-centered market

Our investigation was constantly changing, rather like a dance that led us around the room, an innocent and somewhat clumsy knowledge polka, a wonderment waltz, a blithe ballet of discovery, a hectic tap dance between facts and observations, a questing tango by two dancers who scoured the room, never looking for an exit or a place to rest.

Rather than imagine hard-to-define consciousness or invisible morphic fields driving the emergence of life, a simpler answer is liable to come from retrocausation, the ability of future states of systems to influence prior states.

The unsafe person is in a state of situationally induced paranoia; they are put in a position of terrible alertness', as Sedgwick observes in her essay on paranoia. … The threatened individual can only ensure their safety by feeling unsafe, by maintaining a constant state of anticipatory vigilance. This is the emotional logic of the threatened

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, like so much of Freud's writing, transcends its apparent purpose and makes a super ordinate point about self-understanding. Small things matter. The humdrum and the mundane are as telling - perhaps even more so - as prizes, major undertakings, feats and exploits. Even something as inconsequential as dropping a