The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology

About this book

We are creatures for whom difficulty in understanding who we are constitutes who we are. This is not the difficulty of hard-to-discover facts. Nor is it the difficulty of a ‘pure’ conceptual investigation. It is a weird difficulty internal to our attempts to understand ourselves as having lives. And, in trying to face the difficulty – or in avoiding it – we shape our lives.In his Spinoza Lectures, collectively titled ‘The Idea of a Philosophical Anthropology’, Jonathan Lear combines insights from philosophy and psychoanalysis in an exciting fashion to analyze this difficulty that both constitutes who we are and makes us question who we are.