Sublime

‘The conversion that Socrates is calling for in Book VII of The Republic is not one of faith,’ the philosopher Nancy Bauer writes in an essay, On Philosophical Authority: It is a turning from mindlessness to thoughtfulness, from dogmatism to self-scrutiny, from habit to deliberateness. To become invested in this kind of conversion is not to adopt a

Knowledge—self-knowledge in particular—is freedom.

In each of my five test cases, we fall into an error I’ll describe in the first chapter: of supposing that at the core of each identity there is some deep similarity that binds people of that identity together. Not true, I say; not true over and over again.

That psychoanalysis was his way of being curious about human concerns without, as it were, being waylaid by scientific knowledge and the ameliorating of human suffering. Psychoanalysis, as presented here by Freud, was difficult to classify, or even to clearly describe; but it was, for him, its founder, about curiosity. Psychoanalysis, that is to

In short, the distinction we take for granted every time we blithely notice a conflict between justice and advantage is one that philosophers have not settled how to draw.

Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him? Name, age, race, creed. . . . What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew

Neither blackness nor “people of color” stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread.

Basing your identity on these kinds of principles enables you to remain open-minded about the best ways to advance them.

We’d sit there trying to decide if his actions demonstrated alienation or acclimatisation. Often I thought that they demonstrated that he was Graham Gore. I began to think of him as his own benchmark, which was dangerous. Adela had spotted something in me that I hadn’t, not yet, and if I’d been less charmed by my own levity then I might have been