What does it really mean for a woman to be free? And how can we understand consent when we don't yet know what we're consenting to?

In this episode of Women Reading Confessions, philosopher Abigail L. Rosenthal and Amanda Horgan explore the relationship between consent, female vulnerability, and the realities of living in a woman's body.

Reading from Confessions of a Young Philosopher, Abigail begins with the Jewish people's covenant with God, a historical partnership grounded in consent, responsibility, and the preservation of lived experience. Amanda draws an unexpected connection to Abigail's own experiences as a young woman in Paris, where romantic expectations and sexual innocence raised difficult questions about what genuine consent means.

Their conversation challenges the idea that women's freedom can be understood apart from the physical and social realities of female life. Abigail reflects on sexuality, pregnancy, the expectations placed on women, and the vulnerability that persists even when society insists that women are as free and invulnerable as men.

The discussion also returns to Jewish history, the meaning of being a chosen people, and the troubling persistence of antisemitism in the modern world.

Through personal experience and philosophical reflection, Abigail and Amanda ask what it means to recognize vulnerability without surrendering freedom, and to face the realities of life without denying them.

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.

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.