Snow on the Haystacks, by Monet Fearing the gap - how Lacan's thought derives from Saussure 📚I recommend reading these crucial couple of pages from Saussure's Course in General Linguistics to derive the most value from this essay! In his Seminar VI: Desire and its Interpretation, Jacques Lacan briefly states that “a signifier does not concern a third thing that it supposedly represents but Matthew Stanley • Psychoanalysis
Fenestra Coeli Apertae by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1731) Christianity, Exoteric and Esoteric The esoteric/exoteric distinction The word esoteric possesses a certain mystique to the untrained ear, but has a technical meaning in the study of religions – an esoteric religion is one in which different things are taught to adherents at different levels of the faith. For example, scholars of Buddhism in Matthew Stanley • Theology
Notes on chapter 1 of Sartre's "Transcendence of the Ego" Today I'm sharing my notes on the first chapter of Jean-Paul Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego. The notes provide a blow by blow of each of the chapter's main three sections, including some especially relevant quotes. I dug into this book at the behest Matthew Stanley • Philosophy
How Freud pioneered a structuralist trajectory to Brentano's phenomenology The phenomenological method as developed by Edmund Husserl continues to exert influence over contemporary metapsychological conversations, but it remains haunted by an unresolved tension regarding the nature of the "I", or the Latin ego. On the one hand, the practice of phenomenology assumes the intentionality of consciousness whereby Matthew Stanley • Philosophy
Karma -- the return of the ego in Buddhism Buddhism as traced through the Mahayana branch, especially Ch'an in China and Zen in Japan, proposes a therapy which remedies suffering through a dissolving of the problem. Nirvana is Samsara; Samsara is Nirvana. Realize there is no problem, affect a shift in perspective, and the problem disappears. This Matthew Stanley • Buddhism
Regression to an Imagined Past: Deconstructing the Childhood Friend in Anime Anime relies heavily on tropes, which means that viewers will encounter similar character patterns repeatedly as they watch large amounts of anime. I find the variations of the ‘childhood friend’ (osananajimi) trope particularly fascinating, largely because I had such a figure in my own life, a girl I'd Matthew Stanley • Philosophy
