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Abigail arrives in Paris at a point in a young romantic woman’s life when love comes before experience. In the new podcast series Women Reading Confessions, philosopher and author Abigail L. Rosenthal and Amanda Horgan explore Confessions of a Young Philosopher, Abigail’s memoir of love, philosophy, womanhood, faith, and the search for a truthful life. Each episode begins with Abigail reading an excerpt from her memoir, followed by reflections and conversations exploring the experiences, choices, and questions that shape women’s lives. In this opening episode, Abigail remembers Paris as a place where romance and sexuality were everywhere: lovers in the Métro, mirrors in shop windows, advice about how a woman should look, and the expectation that romantic life would eventually become sexual. She also reflects on the stories that shaped her idea of love, especially Tristan and Isolde and the coup de foudre, the sudden lightning strike of romantic passion. At the time, Abigail was still a virgin and had very little experience of romantic life. Looking back, she can see the difference between what she believed about love and what she was about to learn about desire, sex, reputation, and the realities facing a young woman of her generation. The series begins with the romantic initiation at the opening of Confessions of a Young Philosopher and the experience of becoming a woman before fully knowing what womanhood will ask of you. Read Confessions of a Young Philosopher by Abigail L. Rosenthal: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father. Read Confessions of a Young Philosopher by Abigail L. Rosenthal: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo

In the final episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, philosophers Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin conclude their discussion of Confessions of a Young Philosopher with a question that has followed Abbie throughout her story: How does one return to reality after having been persuaded to abandon it? Suzanne's increasingly delusional worldview had promised a higher understanding of life. Instead, it led to manipulation, isolation, and a dangerous loss of contact with reality. Jerry considers the strange power of such illusions and what becomes of a person who has surrendered her own judgment. Abbie's recovery owed much to the extraordinary wisdom of her mother. She knew how to help without encouraging the fantasies that had brought her daughter to grief. Her love was grounded in an understanding of people as they actually are, with their weaknesses, capacities, and possibilities. She offered Abbie the hope of a "saner happiness," one rooted in real relationships and the ordinary business of living. The experience brought into sharper focus what Abbie calls "passionate history." A human life cannot be exchanged for some imagined, more perfect existence. It must be lived in its own time, with its disappointments, obligations, and unforeseen opportunities. Political, religious, and philosophical illusions may promise escape from that difficulty. But what happens when the promised transcendence proves to be another way of refusing to face the truth? Abbie came to believe that her ordeal had prepared her for something. Having experienced the consequences of one elaborate illusion, she could recognize similar promises taking hold in the wider culture. What had nearly destroyed her gave her a kind of knowledge she would later find herself called upon to use. "The life you were given is your task in the world, and mending it or facing into it is part of the deal." In this concluding conversation, Abbie and Jerry consider the demands of living honestly, the difference between genuine love and comforting illusion, and what painful experience may teach us about the life we have been given. Get the book: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://dearabbie-nonadvice.com/confessions-of-a-young-philosopher-2/ Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What happens when an ideology offers certainty at the cost of reality? In Part 4.2 of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their discussion of Confessions of a Young Philosopher and the danger of replacing lived experience with a ready-made system of belief. Abigail returns to her relationship in Paris, where even love could become formulaic when experience was filtered through ideology. She and Jerry also revisit Suzanne, whose confidence, social insight, and apparent freedom once seemed to offer Abigail another way of moving through the world. Suzanne had an unusual ability to read power and social hierarchy. Abigail now connects that ability less with spiritual insight than with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic - the capacity to see the hidden supports beneath authority and privilege. That insight did not make Suzanne’s worldview harmless. Abigail describes how ordinary experience could be pushed aside, while disagreement or resistance became evidence of moral or spiritual failure. The conversation turns to brainwashing, moral condemnation, social isolation, and the pressure to distrust one’s own perceptions. For Abigail and Jerry, the danger of ideology is not simply that it can be false. It can become so complete that reality itself no longer gets the final word. When Ideology Replaces Reality examines what is lost when certainty replaces experience, and what it takes to recover an honest relation to the world. Continue exploring Confessions of a Young Philosopher Get the book: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://dearabbie-nonadvice.com/confessions-of-a-young-philosopher-2/ Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Why does antisemitism keep returning? In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin begin Part Four, the Aftermath and final section of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, with Abigail’s idea of “passionate history.” The conversation begins with Abigail seeing her former Paris lover years later and finding that he had developed strong antisemitic views. From there, Abbie and Jerry explore the difference between objective history and the history people actually live - shaped by memory, meaning, responsibility, and the choices they make after disappointment or defeat. Their discussion moves through Cain and Abel, sibling rivalry, Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the temptation to blame an outside enemy rather than face what has actually gone wrong. For Abbie, antisemitism is not only a political or historical problem. It is also a problem of how people understand their own lives, their failures, and their place in history. The episode asks what happens when people stop living honestly within the sequence of their own experience - when memory is avoided, responsibility is displaced, and an enemy is brought in to explain a defeat that came from somewhere else.  In Abigail’s account, that act of deflection is part of what makes antisemitism so persistent, and why the story of Cain and Abel still matters. Continue exploring Confessions of a Young Philosopher Get the book: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://dearabbie-nonadvice.com/confessions-of-a-young-philosopher-2/ Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

The strange world Abigail entered under Suzanne’s influence has reached its breaking point. Letters are being sent in Abigail’s name, passports and ordinary conventions have lost their authority, and the Gnostic system that once promised access to a higher truth is carrying her farther from the ground beneath her feet. In this concluding episode of Part Three of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin follow the story through its most dramatic turn: Abbie's return to New York, hospitalization, and the intervention of a mother whose wisdom proves more durable than an elaborate philosophy. When Abbie insists that she has proved God’s power, her mother offers a devastatingly simple observation: a system can possess an internal logic and still be unreal. Later, when Abbie says she had been happy in the Gnostic religion, her mother answers that she will find “a saner happiness.” That exchange opens the way back. Abbie begins to recover confidence in the suspicions she had learned to distrust and in the reality of psyche and soma, spirit and body. The ordinary world, once dismissed as spiritually inadequate, becomes vivid again - a place worth entering rather than escaping. As Part Three of Confessions of a Young Philosopher comes to a close, Jerry and Abbie consider brainwashing, Gnosticism, sanity, feminine wisdom, and what it means to discover that truth cannot be secured by leaving reality behind. Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions follows philosophers Abigail Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin as they revisit Abigail’s philosophical memoir, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, and the experiences that shaped her search for truth. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Abigail L Rosenthal thought she had entered a philosophical thought experiment. Now she is forced to consider something far more disturbing: whether her relationship with Suzanne has become a form of brainwashing. In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their discussion of Gnosticism, spiritual power, and the strange hold Suzanne has gained over Abbie's life. Abbie still cannot dismiss Suzanne as simply a con artist. Some of what she experiences seems genuinely powerful, leaving her determined to find out what is authentic, what is manipulation, and how she has been drawn so deeply into Suzanne’s world. Their conversation turns to Robert Lifton’s work on brainwashing, the use of guilt and isolation as tools of control, and the danger of a spiritual worldview in which doubt itself can be treated as evidence of failure. Abbie also identifies another force that helped keep her there: the pressures of womanhood and the fear that time was running out. Her search for truth had become entangled with the hope that ordinary limits, including chronology itself, might somehow be overcome. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Abigail L. Rosenthal is searching for a way out of a life that no longer seems to be working. Then she meets Suzanne. Suzanne speaks with unusual authority. She wants to be perfect. She calls herself a Gnostic Christian. She seems able to move through difficult situations without fear, without losing her femininity, and without accepting the limits that govern everyone else. Abigail is skeptical, but she is also fascinated. Suzanne appears to possess something Abigail desperately wants: a way to rise above the slow, grinding consequences of ordinary life. What begins as curiosity soon becomes much more serious. Abigail starts experimenting with Suzanne’s belief that spirit alone is real and that the obstacles of everyday life may not be as solid as they appear. She thinks she is conducting a thought experiment. In fact, she is undergoing a conversion. In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail revisit the moment when Suzanne’s strange spiritual worldview stopped being merely interesting and began to reshape Abigail’s life. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What happens when the ideas that once gave your life direction no longer seem to work? In this episode, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin explore the meaning of intelligent hope as Abigail reaches a breaking point in her philosophical and personal life. After years of trying to reconcile femininity, philosophy, love, and truth, she leaves for England with many of her earlier hopes exhausted. Their conversation turns to the difference between hope and wishful thinking, why Abigail believes hope must be grounded in truth, and what it means to keep going without pretending that everything will work out. Along the way, they discuss Hegel, Aristotle, Thoreau, Gandhi, the British class system, and Abigail’s encounter with Suzanne, whose simplicity and confidence begin to suggest a different way through the confusion. At the center is a difficult question: when your old beliefs have run aground, what can still guide you forward? *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Can a woman be feminine and a philosopher? Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin explore the tension between femininity and intellectual life, drawing on Abigail’s experience as a philosophy student at Penn State during a time when philosophy was often treated as a distinctly masculine pursuit. Abigail recalls being told that if she wanted to make real progress in philosophy, she would have to give up or even “destroy” her femininity. Rather than accept that choice, she tried to understand whether a woman could pursue serious philosophical thought without becoming alienated from an essential part of herself. The conversation moves through Simone de Beauvoir, Freud, feminism, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, romantic desire, cultural expectations, and Abigail’s effort to understand the philosophical divide between herself and her former lover, Pheidias. At the center is a larger question: how do you remain true to yourself when the culture around you insists that two parts of your identity cannot belong together? *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What happens when living by your ideals becomes dangerous? In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their discussion of Confessions of a Young Philosopher with the stories of John Armstrong and Anna. John was a fellow Fulbright student in Paris who wanted to test whether his ideals of courage, honor, and integrity could survive in the real world. His decision to travel through Africa would end tragically. Abigail also remembers Anna, a friend drawn to the romance of the Cuban Revolution. Her story leads Abigail and Jerry into a discussion of political idealism, revolutionary movements, and what can happen when ideals collide with reality. They also discuss Albert Camus, existentialism, the philosophy of the absurd, personal integrity, and Abigail's belief that these lives were tragic rather than meaningless. How do we know when an ideal is worth following? When does courage become recklessness? And what does it really mean to live by what you claim to believe? Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 2.3 explores courage, revolution, idealism, tragedy, and the difficult cost of conviction. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal continue their conversation about the aftermath of Abigail’s first love and the complicated truth she carried home from Paris.  Abigail reflects on heartbreak, secrecy, the loss of innocence, and why telling the truth can sometimes distort an experience rather than preserve it. The conversation explores romantic disappointment, privacy, cultural expectations for women, psychoanalysis, and Abigail’s search for narrative continuity as she tries to understand what the relationship meant and what would follow from it.  Jerry and Abigail also consider whether women today have enough space to acknowledge the emotional consequences of first love and heartbreak without reducing those experiences to familiar social or psychological categories. Get a glimpse into next week’s episode as Abigail begins the story of her friend John Armstrong, a fellow Fulbright scholar whose ideals would lead him on a journey with tragic consequences. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What does it mean to be one of God’s chosen people, and why does the Jewish covenant carry both honor and an impossible burden? In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal explore “Of the Impossible Position of the Jews,” the opening chapter of Part Two of Abigail’s book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Jerry and Abigail discuss the meaning of the Jewish covenant, why the Jews became a “pilot project” in humanity’s relationship with God, and how the Hebrew Bible introduced a vision of history in which human actions are seen, remembered, and judged. Abigail describes God as the divine witness whose presence gives moral significance to what people do in the real world. Their conversation also examines the burden of being God’s chosen people, the high expectations placed upon the Jews, Jewish self-criticism, supersessionism, moral responsibility, and the difference between aggression and self-defense. Ultimately, the discussion reaches beyond Jewish history to ask whether every person is called to live in partnership with God, conscious that our actions matter and that our lives unfold under the “white light of truth.” *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What does desire reveal about the difference between men and women? In this episode, married philosophers Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin return to a striking passage from Confessions of a Young Philosopher: “My heavy head of hair bent under his dominion.” The word dominion is deliberate. Abigail does not mean cruelty, degradation, or the loss of freedom. She means the peculiar power of eros: the experience of being enveloped and overcome within an embrace while remaining fully oneself. The conversation moves from Abigail’s life in Paris to Plato, Rodin’s The Kiss, Adam and Eve, and the modern effort to make relations between men and women entirely symmetrical. Abigail argues that erotic life has its own form and its own meanings, asymmetrical in nature, which lovers do not invent but discover. Has modern culture confused equality with sameness? Has it concealed the difference between domination and erotic dominion? And what is lost when sex is reduced to biology, recreation, or power? In this intelligent and unusually candid discussion, Abigail and Jerry consider desire, sexual difference, and the forgotten choreography of eros. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

After her violating experience with Phidias leaves Abigail frightened, heartbroken, and facing the possibility of pregnancy, she turns to her friend Harper. Instead of judgment, Harper gives Abigail the gift of recognition. Understanding more than Abigail expects, she offers practical help, kindness, and what Abigail later calls “that pearl without price”: feminine solidarity. In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin explore female friendship, abortion and sin, feminine innocence, romantic idealism, and the vulnerability women often learn to hide. Their conversation also returns to Phidias and to the uneasy distance between romantic love and the cold, clinical language that can make intimacy feel ordinary or shopworn. What can one woman offer another when innocence has been shaken and the future feels uncertain? Sometimes, the beginning of an answer is simply discovering that someone else understands. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

In Part 1.3 of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their conversation on Part One of Confessions of a Young Philosopher. After her innocence has been taken through seduction and manipulation, Abigail confronts a more difficult truth: beneath the violation, there may also have been something like love. Looking back on her first romantic relationship, she reflects on the authority of intuition, the pity that can arise from love, and the desire to repair an experience that cannot be undone. Jerry and Abigail examine the mixture of manipulation and romantic idealization that shaped the relationship, including the young man’s vision of Abigail as Dante’s Beatrice and an embodiment of the eternal feminine. Yet the episode moves beyond the question of whether he loved her. It asks what happens when first love, injury, innocence, and philosophical longing become impossible to separate. At the riverbank, believing herself ruined and without a future, Abigail considers whether her life has ended along with her innocence. Philosophy offers another possibility: to continue the argument, live through the unanswered questions, and pursue the unfinished love of wisdom. The conversation ultimately turns toward a question Abigail would later ask two women considering suicide: What did you originally want before disappointment made life seem hopeless? After innocence, what remains is not a simple answer, but the unfinished work of understanding love, injury, and the life one had originally hoped to live. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.