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Dec 2023
42m 7s

Ep. 331: Kierkegaard's "Either/Or": The ...

Mark Linsenmayer, Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey
About this episode

On "The Balance Between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality" from Vol. 2 of Soren Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1843).

What is choice? Kierkegaard's character Judge William criticizes the aesthete from our previous episode on the earlier part of this book: The aesthete doesn't make any authentic choices and so doesn't develop a coherent self.

Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion.

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