A Critical Analysis of Jung’s Theory of Archetypes

The Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung is well known for developing his concept of the archetype. This refers to a primordial pattern existing in the collective unconscious, or humanity’s shared, inherited mental contents, which we are unaware of. Jung previously conceptualised archetypes (e.g. the Mother, the Trickster, the Shadow, the Child) as purely mental phenomena…

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A Case for Psychedelic Scepticism

One of the reasons I wanted to write a book on the philosophy and psychology of psychedelic experiences was to defend a sceptical attitude towards these experiences. (You can find preorder links and more information about my book here.) The book’s title, Altered Perspectives, is partly related to this motive. Just as psychedelics can alter our…

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The Ethics of Deadpan Humour: When is a Joke Actually a Lie?

A popular view on comedy is that ethics should have nothing to do with it, and trying to place comedy within the realm of ethics is a way for so-called ‘woke’ and ‘progressive’ types to moralise, police, and censor what can (and can’t) be joked about. The sentiment, from the ‘anti-woke’ crowd, is that if…

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The Individual as a Multiplicity of Selves

One common view in the philosophy of self sees the notion of a discrete, concrete self as an illusion. This concept is known as anatta (not-self) in Buddhism, and it was later defended by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (although he didn’t explicitly draw on Buddhism when making his arguments against the reality of self).…

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Explaining the Aesthetic Dimension of Nature

It may seem intuitive, in evolutionary terms, why we would find natural settings attractive and appealing. The biologist Edward O. Wilson argued that humans possess a trait called biophilia (fondness for nature, or an innate tendency to seek connections and affiliations with nature and other forms of life), which he argued makes sense evolutionarily. It…

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