‘I’m really loving MIT so far,’ MIT philosophy Tamar Schapiro says. ‘The philosophy department here has a reputation as being the friendliest in the country, and it’s really true. People enjoy it, and that creates a virtuous cycle.’
Most of us have impulses we try not to indulge: We generally know we should not get too angry, drive too fast, or be unkind to others. And when we refrain from these things, we often congratulate ourselves for an act of willpower, in which our well-established rational side exercises its rightful veto over our nonrational instincts. Over time, people have interpreted this tension between reason and emotion in diverging ways. One popular trope is that humans are, at our cores, rational decision makers. A different view, popularized by Romantic art and literature, is that our emotions represent our 'true' selves, often stifled by reason. To MIT philosophy professor Tamar Schapiro, however, neither view accommodates our full human complexity. What is salient about the presence of reason and impulse, in part, is that they are intertwined.
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