our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Philosopher Joe Folley on why the self is made rather than found, how attention got thinned into productivity, and why Camus’s later work matters most. Joe Folley is a philosopher and writer, and the creator of Unsolicited Advice, one of YouTube’s largest philosophy channels, where he breaks down complex ideas for a broad online audience.[…] Joe Folley is a philosopher and writer, and the creator of Unsolicited Advice, one of YouTube’s largest philosophy channels, where he breaks down complex ideas for a broad online audience.[…] NYU philosopher Ned Block explains why he thinks today’s AI isn’t conscious, what the hard problem still leaves unanswered, and why biology may matter. The director of Donnie Darko on why the film is so misunderstood Philosopher Joe Folley is skeptical that there’s a core self down there to find.
In this Big Think Conversation with Jonny Thomson, he makes the case for a self that gets built rather than excavated — and argues that the attention it takes to build one has been quietly thinned down into something you spend, trade, and optimize. Then: why nearly everyone reads the wrong Camus book, and why Camus himself seems to have thought his most famous philosophy was only half finished. Joe Folley holds an undergraduate degree and a master’s in philosophy from Cambridge and is the creator of the YouTube channel Unsolicited Advice, where he makes philosophy accessible to a broad audience.
We tend to think about being authentic as burrowing down into ourselves in some sense and finding the core of us. I’m a little bit skeptical that such a core exists. I wish that, you know, instead of when people went out and travel the world or whatever and said, I’m going to find myself, I wish they said, I’m going to make myself.” Jonny Thomson: Joe Folley, thank you for coming on and agreeing to talk to me today.
I’m excited to talk about everything, really, about your philosophy, about Camus and about meaning. But before that, a thing I tend to ask everybody first is what are you reading right now? And as a result of your reading, what ideas may be percolating through your head?
Joe Folley: I’m currently reading a book by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza on, it’s called The Ethics of Attention. It’s about Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil. And the different, the way that they approach attention as a kind of foundation of ethics in a way that to perhaps a more, somebody more familiar with analytic philosophy sounds like it’s going to be very, very strange, but they make a very compelling argument about, yeah.
It gives an idea of how we may have missed some of the... Depth of attention in the way we currently view it today. And I’ve been reading a lot of Simone Weil recently.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
