Sublime

Philosophy, almost by definition, is preoccupied with our craving after some form of certainty or knowledge, a desire to find a once-and-for-all basis of understanding the world. That has traditionally led Western philosophers to pursue a foundation for knowledge. For something to qualify as a foundation for knowledge, that something must somehow b

distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons,

How could such an activity fit in with what other people knew of her? Could anyone accept the whole of her?

In short, my philosophical starting points are: “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force. We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind. Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others.

Hume banished the conception of substance from psychology, as Berkeley had banished it from physics. There is, he says, no impression of self, and therefore no idea of self (Book I, Part IV, Sec. VI). “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light o

In our descriptions of ourselves it is never clear whether we prefer to define ourselves by what we deem to be inconvertible, or by what can be converted; essentialism being on the side of the inconvertible, pragmatism taking the supposedly inconvertible to be a tyranny and a provocation.

Macaulay believed that the disjunctions that afflicted us were intrinsic to the human condition and there was no permanent escape from them.

If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back. We are protean. He gave this idea a Sartrean makeover in a short essay which he began writing in Berlin, but published only in 1939: ‘A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality’.

One of the main components of the modern idea of the self is interiority or inwardness, the feeling that there is a personal inner space that we alone have access to.