Gavin Rae & Emma Ingala’s anthology ‘The Meanings of Violence’ is quite broad and instructive, with Butler, Agamben and others used as stepping off points. I have a heavily tagged copy I regularly refer to…

@Davidson 1 Darn still get those mixed up when typing my bad

Beauvoir and Ellison were actually friends, and his work was a big inspiration for her!

www.jstor.org/stable/467459

@@OverthinkPodcastPhilosophy hello very respectable mam, my name is Enes Acar. I am a philosophy student from Turkey, currently at the process of my master's degree. I know English, Turkish, Arabic and little bit of German and French - currently learning these two. Is there possibly a way/set of things we can do, to be taken by you as your assistant? :) Sincerely yours....

I just read up on it fascinating - thank you for bringing it up. Now on my reading list.

Indeed... I am a philosophy student too at master's degree.... I wish she took me as an assistant. :((( I would happily do that....

How does it take the question of evil seriously? By pointing out that it exists?!

De Beauvoir* 😊

Good point, I both agree and disagree with Beauvoir here. Of course everyone should have that choice, but I see the importance of forcing people outside of their comfort zone as a way of confronting their freedom. One who "chooses" the status quo often does so because confronting the truth of the human condition can be uncomfortable. The question is how does a society actively promote freedom by encouraging people to face the ambiguity of the human condition rather than acting out of bad faith? I think it's a very important question for anyone who considers human freedom to be an ethical principle, but like you said it can lead to contradiction if the freedom for one to avoid their own freedom is not respected. What do you think is the best way to approach the question?

@@mattbaron14 No, thank you.

@@mattbaron14 discomfort has no value unless it’s promoting growth in this case feminism is entropic and valueless and the reproductive mother is growth and life. She should better remain in the comfort of her natural order and in the arms and care of a strong natural male that squashes pedophiles like Sarte and Simone 😉

Ironically same Mao was notorious for sleeping with underage girls. So not surprised Simone supported him. Half of the left-wing philosophers are outright garbage and completely inconsistent with reality.

Faith in biological determinism was stronger in Beauvoir's time than it is today with Sapolsky. In The Second Sex, she deals with the subject by taking up the considerations of the time on the differences between male and female in most mammals, which she does not question: the male does not have as much responsibility for reproduction than the female and can therefore more easily individualize, be more independent, conquering, etc. Body transformation at puberty, menstruation, pregnancies, menopause, effect of hormones on psychology, instability, emotionality etc., she picks up on a lot of things typical of how women are conceived as more body-related than men. But she says : "her body is something other than her (...) she is of all mammalian females the one who is most deeply alienated, and the one who most violently refuses this alienation". So what is important is less biological determinism than the rebellion against it which corresponds to the existentialist attitude, the affirmation of freedom as liberation. P.S. : the translation is mine, I don't have the English version of The Second Sex.

@@bidonbidon7463 thank you for the thoughtful reply. I guess I never realized how completely detached existentialism is from science. What you described is a religious-like faith in an untraceable subjective identity that claims to be the unverifiable center of the universe independent of contingency. Of course Sapolsky would point out that his view is entirely empirical. No faith needed. And he's done a good job building his body of evidence. One can imagine him saying, Show me the evidence of a human will that is independent of biological causes, then I'll believe in "free will." He has a point that's hard to refute without being accused of magical thinking.

@@MarkDParker Not sure how you conclude that existentialism is detached from science when I just said that Beauvoir accepts scientific discourse. The question is that of the fact, of the empirical fact, that a person can try to rebel against biological determinisms, want not to be determined by the heritage of the species, of what is said about her sex, of her destiny etc. Maybe some will call this rebellion "madness", but then, this madness is typically human, is perhaps what characterizes humans compared to other animals incapable of rebelling. How do Sapolsky explain that a human can refuse reproduction, can refuse to serve the specie, can think only for herself as individual?

@@bidonbidon7463 Sapolsky's view is that there is no such thing as "free will" independent of the biological mechanisms intrinsic to the human organism. What you think of as "freedom" (to rebel or buy a pizza...) is actually the result of neurological processes responding to stimuli driving you to think or do this or that. In other words your sense of self is contingent. There is no self independent of the physical laws that govern the universe and our biological evolution. To assert that a non-contingent self, capable of rebelling against these forces, exists is what I take to be a leap of faith. Sapolsky in his own words: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/i75nldZl2ty0qZc.html

@@bidonbidon7463 let me be clear... I, personally, believe that something like freedom is available to sentient beings. But current neuroscience presents a serious challenge that must be answered. Existentialist arguments of the individual self (from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, on...) tend to collapse when confronted with the growing body of scientific knowledge (especially in physics and biology). My sense is that human freedom is rooted in a ubiquitous, non-contingent, volitional awareness or what Zizek calls (and rejects) as a "Big Other," or what the Apostle Paul looked forward to as the God that is "all in all." The personal self in isolation, trapped in spacetime as we are, is simply too contingent upon physical laws to be called "free" in any meaningful way. That freedom, if it is anything more than an illusion, may only be traced to a source(s) beyond the rules of spacetime. Does that mean we must turn to pre-modernity for the answers? Not necessarily. The pre-modern worldview was replaced for good reasons. Somehow, perhaps through the application of logic to metaphysics and ethics, philosophers will find their way out of this conundrum.

How so?

@@bigfat4172 I don't have the time to rewatch and respond. Remind me what the main point of the video is.