BEING WHO YOU WANT TO BE. I have been posting about Colin McGinn’s contention that personality is “not a given, but a choice, not determined but free.” I was chatting over the weekend with an old friend who lives in another state. He had mentioned to me the last time I saw him that a man who lived near him was a member of a large and well-known American family. This weekend, he told me that it turned out not to be true. There had been a divorce and it emerged that the man was not who he said he was. Nobody knows who he is. He chose to lose everything in the divorce proceedings rather than to reveal his real name.
[...] contention that personality is “not a given, but a choice, not determined but free”, I retold a story that a friend of mine had told me. I left out the name and other details. A man who claimed [...]
[...] is the New York Post headline for their article about the latest development in a story which began here a few months ago with a conversation with an old friend of mine who had encountered a neighbor who [...]