Where the field of psychology has continued to be the main authority on the nature of one’s inner world – thoughts, feelings and anything concerning the subjective inner-psyche, there seems in recent years to be an awakening of a new cultural sociology of emotions. While perhaps not as statistically and empirically rigorous as the psychological…
Tag: Essay
Pascal’s Wager – the Best Argument in Favor of Faith
Let us examine this point of view and declare: ‘Either God exists, or He does not.’ To which view shall we incline? Reason cannot decide for us one way or the other: we are separated by an infinite gulf. At the extremity of this infinite distance, a game is in progress, where either heads or…
The Role of God in the Evolutionary Emergence of Cooperation
“Religions are like different maps whose routes all lead to the collective good of society. Some maps take their followers over rugged terrain. Other maps have easier paths […] The maps were made by the people who went first and didn’t die. The maps that survive are the ones that work.” – Scott Adams, 2004….
The Three Motivations For Love: The Hidden Negative Effects of Authenticity and Choice
Introduction: In this essay, I will argue that the current neo-liberal psychotherapeutic discourse on autonomy and self-fulfillment has invaded popular culture so pervasively as to become indistinguishable from daily-ethical “common sense”. In the realm of romantic relationships, this shift in focus promoting allegedly desired states of “authenticity”, “happiness” and “relationship health” have come to obscure…
The Long Lost Letter Exchange Between the Original Stoic, Buddhist and Taoist
This is an excerpt of a news article published on fake-news-articles-so-superfake.com on the 8th of October, 2021. For many years the consensus of historical scholarship assumed that the great philosophical traditions of east and west developed for the most part independently, with minimal or no contact with one another. This alleged independence though plausible, seemed…
On The Function of Philosophy
“To be a philosopher means to travel all the time, questions in philosophy are more essential than answers.” – (Karl Jaspers) Here Jaspers seems to identify, by way of analogy, the philosopher with the traveller, claiming that it is the questions that are “most essential” in the process of doing philosophy rather than the answers…
The Psychological Significance of Christ’s Double Life: God and Man
Summary: This essay discusses the unique combination imbedded in the Christ figure, as being both the abstract all-viewing God as well as an anthropomorphized deity. By understanding the role of uncertainty in the anthropomorphizing tendency, it is speculated that the dual-nature of Jesus enables the “hijacking” of the mentalizing system, by using the same social…
Dark Humor – Multifaceted Nature of Comedy in the Social Context Surrounding Death
In this essay the main subject of inquiry will be humor and its relation to death. Specifically I am interested to investigate “How is the subject of death discussed and understood in the social context of ‘dark humor’? what makes a joke funny, and what does it reveal about modern conceptions of death?”. By first…
Utopian Communes – The Case of Rajneeshpuram and the Israeli Kibbutz
Introduction: The goal of this analysis is to inspect how religious and nationalistic symbolic language is used to either reject or integrate utopian communes within a given democratic society. Based on previous social psychological research, I expect to find that labeling a commune as an “out-group” will be quicker when it is religiously affiliated, as…
Further Than Any Stretch of the Imagination: Where Peterson Goes Too Far
Originally Published on 6th of July, 2017 in the r/JordanPeterson Forum Despite this title, I should note that I have little interest in Peterson’s more controversial political positions regarding gender and transsexualism, which have been the focal point of the criticisms leveled against him. Personally, I found immense value in his lectures, and books and…