About Michael Steinberg

This essay begins, in its first part, by questioning the assumption that human agency is individual and identical with the activity of a pre-social core of conscious experience. Its second …
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The first part of this three-part essay began with the near-universal assumption that we are independent subjects, ultimately identified with a center of conscious experience outside of social life. Both …
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For to comprehend reality means to comprehend what things really are, and this in turn means rejecting their mere factuality. (Herbert Marcuse)[i]

Some things seem utterly unproblematic. We think …
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Earth, water, fire, and air Met together in a garden fair, Put in a basket bound with skin: If you answer this riddle you’ll never begin.             –The Incredible String …
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Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.                         –Goethe, Faust, Part One.[i]

In explaining his choice to present a Critique of Pure Reason instead …
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I am a devotee at a South Indian temple a few miles south of Rochester, New York. It’s caste and gender neutral, at least in theory, and its murti, which …
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I moved to Canada during the Vietnam war and almost by accident found myself an undergrad at Saint Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. I’m anything but Catholic, but …
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The subject of self-consciousness is strewn with intellectual land mines. There is no consensus about what kind of consciousness this is or what it is that we’re conscious of when …
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There is a bat in our bedroom. We don’t know how it got in, but bats can crawl through the narrowest of crevices and passageways, and our old house is …
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If cats are conscious but not self-conscious—that is, if they do not split experience in two and constitute an inner self which stands at one remove from all other perceptions—they …
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