“As a child, my best friend was terrified of marriage. An avid reader of fairy tales, she noticed a pattern: A young person goes off on some kind of adventure, meets weird creatures, travels to strange lands, overcomes obstacles, learns valuable lessons, and eventually, at the end of the story, gets married. The adventures and the challenges and the lessons differ, but the ending is always the same. In a picture book, when you get to the picture of the wedding, you know that that is the last you’ll ever see of the protagonist you’ve come to love. If marriage is where the story of your life ends, then marriage is like death. That’s the moral my friend took away from fairy tales, anyway. It’s also the moral you might take away from Taylor Swift’s love songs. By the time I became a Swiftie—in 2013, her ‘Red’ era—my life had, by the fairy tale metric, ended more than once. People advise you, ‘Forget him!’ as though that were a thing you could will yourself to do. Swift replies: That’s about as helpful as telling me to will myself to know a complete stranger. The first time I heard the song, I interpreted that reply as purely dismissive, but as I listened to it over and over again I came to realize that it contained a tantalizing Platonic suggestion. Plato thought that learning was recollecting, which is to say that when you seem to be acquiring new knowledge, what you are really doing is uncovering knowledge that was buried deep within you. If the same logic applied to love, then it might, in fact, be appropriate to think of the rush of falling in love as willing yourself to suddenly fully know a stranger. Buried in Swift’s songs is a theory of love. To bring it into view, take a step back.”–@AgnesCallard

I wrote about Taylor Swift’s engagement thefp.com/p/is-there-love-af…

I credit @AgnesCallard with teaching me to ask such questions.

Interesting hypothesis

Ok, FINE, if you insist, I’ll write an essay on Taylor Swift’s engagement

The very great @AgnesCallard joins @TheAnnaGat to talk about her excellent new book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. Just two Hungarian girls discussing love and ethics, truth and ignorance, paradoxes and beliefs—and Kant, Aristotle, Mill, Nussbaum, William James—and of course Socrates. Show Notes: (0:00:00) Guest introduction (0:02:52) Why do some people ask load-bearing questions? (0:08:20) You can't force Philosophy on People (0:10:45) Philosophy is a Dangerous Profession (0:13:26) What Broke Tolstoy? (0:20:09) Every Human Flaw Stems from Ignorance (0:26:40) The sociology of conversation (0:32:36) Social Contracts and Reciprocity (0:45:12) The Three Big Philosophical Schools (0:47:21) Shift from Utilitarian to Virtue Ethics (0:53:40) Socrates' Approach to Truth-Seeking (0:57:37) Jamesian Beliefs and Leap of Faith (1:10:07) The Power of Truth In Conflict

“ONE THING SCHOOL NEVER TAUGHT ME IS HOW TO PICK A ROMANTIC PARTNER. FOR THAT, I NEEDED MOTORCYCLES” Sadly, it is behind a paywall.

📚just finished Callard's "Open Socrates". an engaging, thoughtful, solid look @ a way of thinking & living. don't always agree w/ her conclusions & wished she would have developed a couple points deeper. loved it. highly recommend.

Some of the new philosophy books out recently (or later this fall) that we like the look of: fivebooks.com/best-books/new…, picked by Nigel Warburton (@philosophybites) Books by @drangiehobbs, @DavidEdmonds100, @dbatherwoods, @jonathanwebber, @AgnesCallard

Have been thinking a lot in recent days about this @RKoganzon essay on former UChicago president Hanna Gray

...trust is that species of hope that pertains to whether others will hold up their end of the bargain. Reading @AgnesCallard with @PeterBoettke. Doesn't get much better. #Philosophy #ReadMoreBooks

I wrote about motorcycling thefp.com/p/falling-in-love-…

“Roller coasters do not feel like flying, bungee jumping does not feel like flying, and flying in an airplane most definitely does not feel like flying. Maybe riding a horse or waterskiing could feel like flying, but I was never able to get good enough at either to find out. Having sought out the flying feeling my whole life, I can report that I have only ever found it in two places: swings and motorcycles. It has to be the right kind of swing, with very long chains—the kind they don’t allow in playgrounds anymore. But when I was in my early 20s, I realized something had changed in my brain or inner ear, and I couldn’t swing without becoming nauseated. A few years later, I discovered motorcycles. More specifically, I discovered a guy with a motorcycle.”—@AgnesCallard

Jeffrey Wernick, @AgnesCallard & I talk about the Regulation of Attention: bitchute.com/video/sLvPPftyQ…