psychology dector

J’avoue d’office que ma question et ma réponse sont totalement truquées en ce sens que je vais nommer des qualités particulières que je possède personnellement en partie supposée être suffisante. Il y a également des réponses pour lesquelles je me rends compte que je tire un peu vers moi la couverture. Je les laisse néanmoins car elles sont pertinentes. Je dis pourtant qu’elles pourraient être remplacées par des réponses légèrement différentes. • Mieux vaut avoir une petite culture en philosophie conventionnelle, rien que pour éviter d’être totalement un philistin qui ignore même la terminologie d’Aristote et de tous ceux qui l'ont suivis. • Etre au courant des discussions ordinaires sur le “free will” (libre arbitre). • Pouvoir s’exprimer an anglais. Curieusement, je considère que la langue allemande n’ajoute rien d’obligatoire aux qualités du candidat. C’est une manière de dire que, si je pensais qu’il fallait posséder l’allemand pour être post-philosophe, j’aurais fait un effort...

The following blog post is dedicated to friends who have suffered—recently or less recently—from the death of loved ones. Unfortunately I'm aware of an unavoidable problem in my reasoning. The basic idea that our human brains were never designed to handle philosophical and/or scientific thinking is best understood by those who've read a science book such as The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins. If you've never encountered such a book, then my elementary reasoning might fail to convince you. It is pointless to think of a deceased individual as “damaged”. He/she has simply disappeared. My use of the word “damages” refers to those who are left behind: relatives and friends of the deceased. Often they will have called upon subterfuges to weaken the blow of the death of their loved one. But this “solution” might not work successfully in the immediate future, if ever. In the past, religions provided the best subterfuges. But, with the disappearance of profound religiosity in ...

Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage (French, 1848–1884) Oil on Canvas, 1879 I begin this essay with two stories: A teacher I knew at a Catholic elementary school became pregnant with twins, and due to the inadequacy of her paycheck and her husband’s self-employment in construction, she had no health insurance.   When the time came for her to deliver, she went to the emergency department at LAC + USC Medical Center.   Once she had been signed in, she waited on a gurney in the hallway with a number of other similarly struggling mothers to await full dilation and crowning of the child’s head before being wheeled into the delivery room.   Many of these women were screaming in agony, but were virtually ignored by the staff.   The teacher, herself, wanted an epidural, but the nurse informed her it was too late and she would have to go naturally.   She was worried about the fact that she would be birthing two babies, but was powerless to fight back and demand immediat...

There’s a nice French expression to designate a sudden urge: une envie de pisser [wish to pee]. That’s what happened to me a moment ago, leading up to the present message. It’s a philosophical viewpoint that has been pursuing me ceaselessly for a long time. So, here it is. Our outlook on existence is totally biased by the particular dimensions of our observations, which define a mere window. We remain incapable of adopting windows that might be more macroscopic or microscopic. • The first weakness means that, in spite of our gigantic windows out into space-time, we remain like ants who imagine their anthill as the entire universe. • The second weakness means that, in spite of our fondness for elementary particles and string theory, we humans are not very good at dealing with things that are far smaller than what we see through our eye-glasses. Besides, it’s funny that we introduce a direction into these two scale differences. What right do we have to say that, in the macroscopic case,...

“To philosophize is to learn how to die.” (Cicero) There are books we remember all our lives.   We remember where we first read them, the way they made us feel, the way the world seemed so fresh, so colorful, so new when we finished the last page.   We remember how we never wanted them to end. I had that experience reading Sarah Bakewell’s At The Existentialist Café:  Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails (Other Press, 2016).   I knew Bakewell was good— I reviewed her book on Montaigne a few years ago—but this is a masterwork of biography not just of a person, but people, places, a philosophy and a way of life.   In fact, early on, she calls Existentialism more a mood than a philosophy and traces its lineage back to Job and Ecclesiastes in the Bible, up through St. Augustine and Blaise Pascal, to Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus , Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.   The last seven names are the ...

There are 7000 living languages on earth, says Mark Nepo in his book, Seven Thousand Ways To Listen: Staying Close To What Is Sacred (Atria Paperbacks, 2013).   He is quoting the Nigerian linguist Olasope Oyelaran.   To hear, truly to hear what is spoken in any language, with the body, with expression, involves a kenosis, an emptying of the self.   Only then, according to Nepo, can one enter into the realm of deep listening. I first encountered Nepo’s work in his The Book of Awakening (Conari Press, 2000).   He is a teacher and a survivor of cancer which led him to develop his own philosophy of being in the present, a not-unheard-of idea similar to many eastern philosophies, including Buddhism.   We must learn, he argues in his introduction, to return “quite humbly, to the simple fate of being here.”   This is where deep listening becomes sacred work. Ironically, a loss of hearing due to chemotherapy drew Nepo back to the fundamental sensory percept...