Sometimes, however, the new synthetic complex proves stable, and even serves as the beginning of a much larger cluster of attitudes that displace some we've previously considered to be fixed parts of ourselves.

Both Proust and Joyce record the ways in which human perspectives can be transformed. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is constantly undergoing epiphanies, but their effects are transitory: the new synthetic complex quickly falls apart. Proust's characters, by contrast, often achieve lasting changes of perspective.

Refined religion is aimed at realizing ethical values, including the fostering of human lives and human communities.

Finally, this is one way to reconcile the delight in beauty with the bourgeois life. Aschenbach, on one reading, has spent virtually all of his adult life balancing his restrained homosexuality, which is bound together with his sensitivity to beauty and thus with his artistic vocation, against the demands of conventional society.

Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn.

I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.

The expert is a midwife. The expert is not someone who has the authority to pronounce the last word on the subject.