Psychology
-
I’m not me, I’m what I have decided to be…… or am I?
After what started out as a quite jovial conversation this week I have decide that I am no longer a Caucasian man of average build, of European decent, and around the 6ft tall mark, I am instead a 7ft man named Leeroy, I am of African decent and I’m hung like a horse (you don’t… Continue reading
-
Nozick, refuting hedonism
I’m not going to explain what hedonism is, or its varying forks, save to say that it is the position of seeing pleasure/lack of pain as the best goal. In this essay I intend to examine Nozick’s attempt to refute hedonism as a rational position. I will set out with an assumption that hedonism is… Continue reading
-
Locke on the ‘Person’
Locke’s work is important, for me it is useful though flawed but the project he undertook has been reformulated by other philosophers to be a more complete account. Locke saw PERSON as, importantly, a separable substance to MAN. I will attempt to understand his theory and why it is necessary, look at the accounts of… Continue reading
-
Prepare to become difficult
I have a theory that people seek out what they are not so they can then possibly become, what I mean by that is vicarious assimilation of experiences through reading or viewing material. I once read a series of travel books by Bill Bryson at a time when I had been nowhere in the world,… Continue reading
-
A new focus on psychology
I’ve recently changed the focus of my educational efforts from philosophy to psychology, thinking maybe I have gone as far as I can with the former discipline, but thankfully stopping short of analytics, I hate analytical philosophy anyway so it’s a good time to end. Encouraged by others to pursue a career in psychoanalysis I… Continue reading
-
How’s my therapy going?
Brilliantly, that’s the only way I can describe it. It is person-centred or Rogerian therapy (Carl Rogers, look it up) and my therapist is impressive, highly professional and very knowledgeable; she is my guide to knowing myself. I have managed to learn more about myself in six weeks than in the forty two years that… Continue reading
-
Recognising the right to identify
An old friend phoned last night, he reminded me of something I had been thinking about a long time ago when I lived in my home country. I am from a place where prejudice permeates every conversation and every interaction, my country has effectively got two simultaneously active and opposing cultural identities, the Irish and… Continue reading
-
A look in the eye
Herbert Marcuse had a problem, the rationalised world of instrumental reason used as a way of explaining the social behaviour of humans. Measurable, predictable, analytic human subjects conforming to a statistical model, fitting neatly on a graph or perfectly represented by the Nash equilibrium. I agree with Marcuse that this is problematic, people do not… Continue reading
-
Too much
I’m reading a book at the moment by Robin Norwood called Women Who Love Too Much, it’s very good and equally applicable to men. Someone I know recommended it to me so I bought it for the Kindle app on my phone. Two chapters in and there are stories highlighting the subject, those folks who… Continue reading
-
Science can be refuted but not verified
I intend to expand upon the questions proposed by Descartes, Hume and Popper. Knowledge requires definition as to what it is and how it is used. We don’t know what we don’t know but we can speculate based upon the limitations of what we do know or can state with a degree of certainty. I… Continue reading
