Self-Reliance Self-Reliance "Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow their own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." This essay is an analysis into the nature of the “aboriginal self on which a universal reliance may be grounded.” The first hint of the philosophy
Anti-individualism Burge and McKinsey replies in his "Accepting the Consequences of Anti-individualism". Many of the essays found in Hilary Putnam's "The Twin Earth Chronicles" are considered early formative works for the anti-individualist model from the analytic perspective. Anti-individualism Anti-individualism (also known as content externalism) is an approach to various areas of thought (both analytic and continental) including philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, French historical studies, literature, phenomenology and linguistics. The proponents arguing for anti-individualism in these areas have in common the view that what seems to be internal to the individual is to some degree dependent on the social environment, thus