Please join Countway Library and the HMS Center for Bioethics for an Author Series event with Dr. Ian Marcus Corbin about his new book: To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World.

About the Book:

A sweeping meditation on the human search for home, drawing on the works of philosophers, poets, novelists, scientists, anthropologists, and theologians

Why do so many people in modern societies feel not at home in their worlds? How have they become so alienated from one another, the natural environment, and even themselves? In this ambitious book, Ian Marcus Corbin engages the fundamental questions surrounding friendship with oneself, one’s family, friends, community, nation, and species.

Corbin begins with a deep humanistic and scientific dive into how humans inherit and refine their picture of the world in community, including what makes this process more or less successful. He goes on to examine some human cultures—Native American, African, and early American—that seem to have excelled at making their people feel at home. He contrasts these cultures with contemporary America in particular, a society characterized by a facsimile of belonging that substitutes a paranoid, self-protective culture of ownership for the self-opening practice of friendship. The book’s coda is a call to abandon the illusion of ownership and to reopen ourselves to friendship with each other, nature, and even the deepest sources of existence. 

About the Author: 

Ian Marcus Corbin, PhD is an instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. He received his PhD in philosophy at Boston College, a Master's Degree in philosophy and religion at Yale University, and a Bachelor's Degree in politics at Gordon College. He studies intersubjectivity, cognition and human flourishing, using the tools of philosophy and cognitive science. He is interested in the ways that our philosophical anthropologies shape the treatment of patients, and vice versa. He is publishing a book on belonging with Yale University Press in 2024.