You aren’t alone in feeling this way. But the world does constrain our choices – every day we have to make decisions about what we’ll sacrifice in exchange for something else. The key to not letting that fact erode you is being able to recognise yourself in what is decided.

You mention you’ve already told her you don’t want to investigate for her. Good on you. If she keeps pushing, I wonder whether you could focus on legitimating her feelings, if not her requests and action-items. I cross-specialise in ethics, language, and epistemology [the study of knowledge]. In all three areas I am interested in the powers we can only have because we are social creatures. I work on moral powers that we can only exercise in social settings – such as consent, and promise – how linguistic meaning can be constructed and destroyed by social relationships, and how being embedded in societies can facilitate or disrupt our processes of gaining knowledge. The uniting theme across my work is that we depend on each other for many of our most important abilities and powers, such as speaking, learning, or coming up with moral frameworks, and yet a lot of the time other people are very bad. So what are we to do, if we rely on each other for our most foundational abilities but frequently “each other” is the source of our problems? So far I only have the question. But that’s where all good philosophy starts… Sounds like a phenomenal place to start. Now let’s have a fan-girl moment. Who is your favourite philosopher?

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Gordon-Smith's thesis is that reason, rationalism and evidence are not predominant causal factors in the significant changes of mind we all experience in our lives. She offers some field-work and a few anecdotes to support this, but as I read the book I could not shake off the impression that Gordon-Smith is more concerned with showing us how smart and likeable she is, rather than probing deeply into this complex subject. The reassuring stuff first: lots of people do things in their teenage years that are mortifying to them years later. Getting an identity can feel like an urgent task during adolescence, as though if I throw on the regalia of being This Kind of Person then I’ll have the things I’m actually in need of, like self-understanding, or attractiveness, or independence. A lot of people try on all kinds of guises, from goths to young toastmasters, then shed them again before adulthood. Unfortunately reasoned conversation or punitive cutting-off are only rarely tools of conversion A third-year Ph.D. student in politics, William Wen was recognized for his work as a preceptor in “Introduction to Quantitative Social Science.” “He was always enthusiastic, warm and effortlessly professional with the students and with me,” said Marc Ratkovic, an assistant professor of politics.

Inspiring, moving and perceptive, Stop Being Reasonableis a mind-changing exploration of the murky place where philosophy and real life meet. How do I figure out what I want? I feel like I am good at achieving goals that I care about, but I’m hopeless at deciding what goals to pursue. I don’t know what I want and I’ve gotten increasingly anxious about it over the last five to 10 unhappy years. I’m anxious to set any goals because I feel like I’m absolutely unable to decide what to do. The problem with a pop-philosophy book is that the discussion felt entirely too short and left me wanting much more. I was really interested especially in her ending statements by the seeming illogicality of love and our failure to value emotion when engaging in discourse. What is love is a question that hasn't really been answered, and Gordon-Smith's musings on it were incredibly interesting. The catcalling segment was also engrossing, where men are confronted with how women don't like cat-calling yet are unable to square that with their inner narrative of women liking it and them just being normal men instead of utter creeps. The ending felt incredibly abrupt. I can't help but think this book could have been so much more because the thesis of this book is incredibly strong. It is curious and intelligent and deeply researched and genuinely thoughtful, and at the same time consistently entertaining to read...If you want to introduce someone to philosophy, give them this book.' — Alex Tighe, Australian Book Review

Stop Being Reasonable

So an atheist is not going to be rationally persuaded to join a religious cult, and a member of a religious cult is not going to be rationally persuaded to become an atheist. But if these two people marry each other, it's quite possible that one of them will change because they love each other, and they don't want to have incompatible beliefs. I'm not sure Stop Being Reasonable tells me a lot about my own situation, though I could no doubt think that through more carefully to get some insights. Either way, it's well-written, accessible, engaging and yet at the same time not at all dumbed down in how it presents its case, drawing on a seamless collection of contemporary and canonical philosophy, popular culture, journalism et al. What its argument boils down to is that conventional rationality is not sufficient (or even adequate) to explain why people change their minds, using a quite varied set of empirical case studies to support the argument. The people concerned have changed their minds in quite dramatic - but not conventionally rational - circumstances. This then has implications for how people can be persuaded to change their minds by others, and therefore it is significant to politics, public education campaigns etc. Christopher Parton is expected to graduate this year with a Ph.D. in musicology. He served as the Quin Morton ’36 Teaching Fellow in the Princeton Writing Program, teaching a writing seminar titled “Sound and the City” that examines what can be learned about a city’s history, community and ecology from listening to an urban environment. In addition, Christopher Parton from the Department of Music was honored with the Quin Morton Graduate Teaching Award for instructors in the Princeton Writing Program, and Jeewon Yoo from the Department of English was recognized with the Collaborative Teaching Initiative (CTI) Graduate Teaching Award. Eleanor Gordon-Smith

That’s what gets you to part two; finding equilibrium with the remainder. Even when we’ve put serious elbow grease into making a life we’re proud of, there will be moments of loneliness and grief and worry. They may even be frequent. It can be tempting then to abandon the changes we’ve made, thinking “why bother?” – as though the things we fill our life with have betrayed us if we still don’t feel full. Resist that temptation as much as you can. Pain is an inevitable part of living; by staying engaged with the world and other people we can come to see that feeling as a companion to joy instead of a threat. Do you have a conflict, crossroads or dilemma you need help with? Eleanor Gordon-Smith will help you think through life’s questions and puzzles, big and small. Your questions will be kept anonymous. It’s not in either of your interests that your wife keeps that story secret. The whole family unit needs to recover.I’m less worried about his political views than I am about his views on masculinity. His political beliefs are ultimately up to him, and politics are for many people oddly independent of their actual character. But a dismissal of women, or a narrative that men have been made victims of feminist progress – that can be much harder to shift. One useful way to start might be to look deeply at why this “hobby” has such enduring appeal. Is it a feeling of danger, youthfulness, losing oneself, risk, reinvention? (I guess these apply equally, whether it’s sex or actual motorcycling.) If you can get to the root of why it appeals, you’ll get two useful things. The first is one you won’t want to hear. It’s to try finding something else that scratches the same itch. On that note, I know it’s easier said than done, but try not to be too fearful that this has damaged your reputation. You may be surprised how many people already know and love an addict. When it’s your dirty laundry hanging bleach-bright for everyone to see, it’s easy to think you’ll be judged into damnation, but try to remember what it’s like when you see someone else’s. Amanda Irwin Wilkins, director of the Princeton Writing Program, said Parton “empowers students to understand how, as apprentice scholars, their own arguments can join wider conversations at both the University and in public life.” Kitap, hayatının bir evresinde fikir değiştirme konusunda beklenenin dışında davranan insanların öyküsüne odaklanıyor. Örneğin bir hikayede kocasıyla ilgili önemli bir yalanı ortaya çıkaran bir annenin kafasını neden kuma gömmediğini incelerken, başka bir hikayede doğduğu günden beri üyesi olduğu tarikatin etkisinden kurtulan bir adamın hikayesini detaylandırıyor. Bunlara benzer 6 farklı hikaye anlatıyor yazar. Hafiften araştırmacı gazetecilik arkasına bağlanmış felsefi ve psikolojik çözümlemeler ile bolca soru içeren ama cevaplamaya odaklanmayan bir tarzı var.

Stop Being Reasonable is infinitely readable, opened up my views and made me consider the moments that I overly engage in being rigid or reasonable (and even agreeable) to an absolutely unnecessary degree. It highlights when we should all be a little more critical of situations that would hope or seek that we suspend belief when shit is actually crazy. For example, the attempted rewriting of truth/reason/logic through the space of the T**** years. A period of time that we do not need to extend any grace or space towards because it’s madness. It is sometimes held that rationality defines us as human, a claim written into our species name, Homo sapiens. If this is right, it follows from Gordon-Smith’s witty, intelligent book that, like the people she profiles, we do not really know who, or even what, we are. A second-year Ph.D. student in chemical and biological engineering, Evelyn Navarro Salazar was recognized for her work as a preceptor in “Mass, Momentum, and Energy Transport.”The second thing you’d get from reflecting on why you want this is a more productive conversation with your wife. She might have legitimate objections to the particulars here (if it’s actually motorcycling, the risks; if it’s a sex thing, monogamy). And she might be entitled to hold on to them. But if you can tell her what you want to feel, whether it’s excited or invigorated or like your own person again, it’s a lot harder to just say “nope”.