The world of modernity is a disenchanted world

According to Weber, what was salient about the culture of modernity was the large and increasing extent to which its values were those of instrumental rationality. Certain ends are taken as given and rationality is taken to consist in calculation as to the most efficient means to achieve those ends. Instrumentality rationality is socially embodied …

Filosofi och samhälle

I söndagens Filosofiska rummet diskuterade Torbjörn Tännsjö och Hans Ruin "den djupa klyftan" mellan kontintental och analytisk filosofi. Diskussionen var egentligen inte särskilt bra eftersom såväl Tännsjö som Ruin var mer intresserade av att peka på bristerna i den andres tanketradition. För mig som lyssnare och hemmahörande i den kontinentala tanketraditionen innebar det bara att …

How psychology makes itself true – or false

Psychology is not only the study of human thinking, feeling, acting, and interacting: it has itself – like the other human sciences – brought into being new ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and interacting. We ordinary people whom the psychologist studies have turned out to be not quite the same ordinary people that we were …

Man is essentially a story-telling animal

A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can …

The Unity of Human Life

In what does the unity of an individual life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask 'What is the good for me?' is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. To ask 'What is …