Our identities are shaped and exist in relation to others. The way others relate to me and the way I can relate to them is fundamental to my sense of self, of who I am. When relationships play such a crucial role, some amount of drama is inevitable. However, we can become the prisoners of …
Tag: identity
Spreading the Word: What Is Lived Experience?
People use the expression 'lived experience' with increasing frequency. We usually mean it as the first-person privileged access to a particular way of experiencing something. Usually, this particular way is intertwined with and expressed in various social identity terms. My lived experience as a woman, as a migrant, as an Eastern European, and so on. …
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Visiting St Paul’s Catacombs in Malta – Part 3: The Rituals
I visited St Paul's catacombs in the first week of this year. It turned out to be a much more exciting experience than I had expected, so I decided to write a short series of articles about it. This is the third and final part where I explore the burial rites linked to the people's …
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Spreading the Word: What Is True Cosmopolitan?
What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? The word literally translates as a citizen or resident of the world. The entire world. Is it possible to belong everywhere? Doesn't that mean to belong nowhere? In today's short and inspiring video, the author Elif Shafak talks about cosmopolitanism and how we all have multiple belongings shaping …
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Life in Search of Narrative
The 20th-century French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote in his 1991 essay Life in Quest of Narrative that life is "an activity and passion in search of a narrative". Indeed, it is hard to overstate how important the stories are to us, human beings. Narrative is a medium through which we make sense, interpret, understand, identify, …
Spreading the Word: Why Do We Self-Sabotage?
The value of self-knowledge lies partly in our ability to consciously understand ourselves and then develop more integrated personalities. The opposite of this implies having elements that are somehow disconnected from what we identify with when we think of 'who we are'. These elements are in our blindspots, obscured from our self-knowledge. If so, internal …
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On Being Yourself
''Be yourself, no matter what they say'' is the advice that Sting gives us in his elegant song Shape of My Heart. I agree. But how do we do that? How can we be ourselves? Deeper still, what does it mean to be ourselves? And how do I know who my-self is? After all, whatever I …
People Change and Stay the Same
The title of this article is contradictory on purpose. Do you think that people can change or do you think that they stay fundamentally the same? This question is far less contradictory, isn't it? That is just because it has 'or' in the middle, not 'and'. Indeed, could there be an 'and' in the middle, or, in …
Am I what I do? Functionalism in Philosophy
How do you usually introduce yourself? What is it that you say when asked to tell others about yourself? Who are you? There are variations in answers, of course, as well as exceptions to common conventions. However, I have yet to meet a person who'd start their introduction by stating that, for instance, he is a human …
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What makes you You? An imaginary dialogue with John Locke
Are you the same person you were 10 years ago? What about when you were a child? And what about yesterday? And since we are talking about it – will you be the same person tomorrow? Perhaps we should start by asking what does it mean to be the same person and what a “person” …
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