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Hasir Mushtaq

@hsrmk.com

Currently a Sr. Software Engineer at @oracle.com, studied Electronics and Communications Engineering at @iiit.ac.in (IIIT Hyderabad)

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Hasir Mushtaq@hsrmk.com

Hasir Mushtaq@hsrmk.com

· hsrmk.com

Hasir Mushtaq

@hsrmk.com

“Take Sartre. His main point – that no one else can tell you who you are, and you choose what your own values are – seems so cliched, so much like what an uncreative graduation speaker might say – that it hardly seems worth elevating him to the Canon Of Philosophical Greatness.

Read History Of Philosophy Backwardsslatestarcodex.com

1:20 PM · Sep 17, 2026

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Hasir Mushtaq@hsrmk.com·Sep 17

#Blogroll2/2

“My hypothesis – and I don’t know if it’s true – is that this only sounds cliched because Sartre won. The point of studying Sartre isn’t to learn that you choose your own identity, but to read him backward – to start with this idea that choosing your own identity is obvious, and then read Sartre to learn exactly how controversial it was at the time and what sorts of arguments Sartre had to go through to get people to accept it, and eventually understand the position that the original reader of Sartre was supposed to have started with. If you succeed, you might still believe that you choose your own identity, but you’ll also understand that this isn’t an obvious necessary fact of the universe, that there used to be people who believed you didn’t and that they had some good arguments too.

Read History Of Philosophy Backwardsslatestarcodex.com