Hello, my name's David Rundserman and this is past, present future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, it's the last episode in the current run of the history of bad ideas. We will be coming

back to this subject. We are not going to run out of bad ideas. But for today, it's an idea

we've wanted to talk about in this series for a while. The idea is identity. And I'm speaking

to the philosopher Alexander Douglas, who has just published a book called Against Identity,

The Wisdom of Escaping the Self. It's a brilliant book, and it's full of really interesting ideas.

Alex, we're talking about an idea today, which on one level is familiar to everybody, identity.

We're also going to be talking about a philosopher, Spinoza, who is, let's just confess this

up front, certainly it's true for me anyway, quite difficult, a challenging philosopher,

and some of the ideas might be a bit unfamiliar.

So we're going to be bridging the ground between a very familiar concept and maybe a way of

thinking about it, which is it's a bit of a stretch, but it's worth it. People should stick with this.

But before we do that, we should probably just talk through the idea itself. And also,

I'm very conscious this is in a series called The History of Bad Ideas. You have written a book

called Against Identity. But I don't think you're saying, or I would want to say, that identity

is just a bad idea because it is a completely necessary idea. You can't really be human

without being involved in the search for identity.

So maybe that's where we should start. What do you mean by identity? You're against it in some sense,

but you're also not saying that it's the sort of thing that it was a mistake to come up with in the

first place. So what is it that we're talking about here? And using identity in, I think, the most core philosophical sense,

which you can go back to the very etymology of the word, comes from the Latin, edem,

which just means the same. No, when I said edem, we say one and the same. Identity, in the sense

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