As someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and as someone who is really into trying the various exercises that philosophers like to prescribe sometimes, I always wonder how various philosophical practices would interact with my disorder. I gave myself a challenge for the year 2024: to commit to practicing one new philosophical exercise each month, and to write about it on my blog . Because of the Stuck on the Puzzle project, I decided, for January 2024, to take on Plutarch’s anti-curiosity exercises, described in his essay On Curiosity [1] Indeed, I was specifically interested in seeing if those exercises could help counteract OCD. Reflecting on my own OCD, I came to agree with Juliette Vazard’s assessment that this disorder must have something to do with a dysfunction of the mechanism that normally leads someone to pick out things worth inquiring into [2] . She describes two linked affective mechanisms: one mechanism to assess if a proposition has stakes that are pragmat
A philosophical inquiry on OCD