The Limits of Pleasure, A Salon with Paul Bloom

(This event is a hybrid salon. You can attend in person at Full Circle House, or connect remotely.)

Can we live a good life without suffering? With sharp insights, renowned psychologist Paul Bloom captures the strangeness of being human and makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to both pleasure and meaning in our lives. The conventional image of humans as purely pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding isn’t so much wrong as incomplete, he claims. Join the debate as Bloom challenges us to rethink our vision of a good life.

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ABOUT

Paul Bloom is a Canadian American psychologist. He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. He explores some of the most puzzling aspects of human nature and his research is centres focused on how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, pleasure, fiction, and art. Bloom is the recipient of multiple awards and honours, including most recently the million-dollar Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize. He has published over a hundred scientific articles and his popular writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Natural History, and many other publications.

 GOOD READS

 The Sweet Spot: The Pleasure of Suffering and the Search for Meaning (2021), Against Empathy. The case for rational compassion (2016), How Pleasure Works: The new science of why we like what we like (2010), Descartes’ Baby: How the science of child development explains what makes us human (2004).