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.

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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.