Thoughts With Thinkers

Psychology

Sigmund Freud

The Ideas of Sigmund Freud: Freud is the author of several influential books including Civilization and its Discontents and Totem &Taboo. But he was a medical doctor, not a psychologist.

Understanding Sublimation: We all have impulses to do socially inappropriate things, we have sexual fantasies, that if we manifest in public, would be less than ideal.

Carl Jung

The Persona, The Shadow, and The Anima: There is a disconnect between conscious intention and reality.

The Story of Robert Crumb: “When I was a teenager, girls were just utterly out of my reach. They wouldn’t even let me draw them.” Crumb leans back in his chair and laughs. “Yeah. All that changed after I got famous.”

The Road to Individuation: Your shadow is integrated when you allow it to contend with your consciousness.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Autotelic Life: “Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.” –Thomas Carlyle.

Alfred Adler

What is the Inferiority Complex? Each individual is born with a weakness.

Joseph Campbell

The Role of Myths In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell shows us what the myths of the past have in common.

Robert Greene

How to Read Robert Greene: The reason why I enjoy his work is because they are written in a simple way, and while there is some degree of pretension, his outlook on human nature resembles my own.

How to Read the 48 Laws of Power? : The 48 Laws of Power is a great book that contains tremendous insight into cunning, deception, self-deception, and power. Greene weaves short historical anecdotes to support his arguments in each chapter. And each chapter is a proverb or recommendation.

Yuval Noah Harari

How to Read Yuval Noah Harari?: Harari has written three books that are unlikely to lose their appeal any time soon. In accessible language, Harari takes his readers on a journey into the past, the present, and the future.

Jordan Peterson

The Maps of Meaning Lectures: Jordan Peterson is often less known for the content of his work than he is for his sometimes controversial political views, but I personally was attracted to the content in these lectures that were based on his first book Maps of Meaning.

Peterson’s Logos Argument, or Why Atheists Aren’t Atheists: “Logos” was re-popularized by Jordan Peterson, who has used it as a weapon against atheists.

The 7 Lessons of Jordan Peterson : While Peterson’s political views are controversial, what is not controversial is his insight into human psychology. These are 7 lessons any person can benefit from.


Philosophy


Hegel

The First Man – Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History, says that Hegel provided us a non-materialist mechanism to understand the historical process, not at the expense of our economic account of history, but as a supplement to it. “Recognition” allows us to understand human motivation in a richer way, as a historical dialectic, than Marx’s version.

Nietzsche

Staring into the Abyss Meaning:  ‘He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee” – Nietzsche

The Busiest People Harbor The Greatest Weariness Meaning: With Nietzsche, as with any great contrarian, we find quotes that point us towards a truth that is at once counter-intuitive and provocative. Of course, when asked to imagine what it would feel like to be depressed, one gets the image of inactivity and resignation. After-all, depression is only an anomaly because it results in behavior that runs counter to the normal pace of life.

George Bernard Shaw

The Reasonable Person Adapts Himself Meaning: Progress, if it is at all possible, we are taught, can only come from rational thought.

Nassim Taleb

Resolving the Talebian Paradox: There are several principles that the Nassim Taleb has talked about, including the precautionary principle, which teaches us to be cautious under conditions of uncertainty. But sometimes, his principles seem to clash with each other.

Albert Camus

The Philosophy of the Actor: “Of all kinds of fame the least deceptive is the one that is lived.” – Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus – What is the Worst Punishment?: And as Camus said, most people enjoy the climb to the top more than being at the top anyway, and so the challenge of pushing a rock up the hill could theoretically provide them with at least some pleasure.

Karl Popper

The Science as Falsification Problem in Philosophy: Popper defines the way the modern mind approaches theories but there is something profound (pun intended) that is lacking in that approach.

Rene Girard

Mimetic Theory: The Origin of Conflict: What is behind human motivation? Freud would tell you that all human goals are manifestations of the biological need to reproduce. All our desires, including intellectuality and aesthetic taste, are merely by-products of sexual signaling.

Slavoj Zizek

The Value of Imperfection (Week 50 of Wisdom): In the last few decades, the possibility of downloading our thoughts into a computer has been discussed. And just as with the internet, the first people who talked about mind uploading were small in number, and eccentric in character.