| To whom should we have allegiance—the version of ourself making choices, or the version of ourself who will be affected by them?  Photograph by Jordan Tiberio for The New Yorker Before she presented the paper that became her book “Transformative Experience,” L. A. Paul remembers thinking, “This is going to ruin my career.” She was forty-six, a philosopher with tenure at the University of Arizona, and she was asking her colleagues to consider the experience of having a child—a vital area of concern in millions of people’s lives, but rarely discussed in the world of academic philosophy. “It’s all going to be over, because here I am talking about babies.” In fact, the opposite happened. Paul won the 2020 Lebowitz Prize for philosophical achievement, and “Transformative Experience” has been translated into several languages and is widely read outside academic circles. It is an investigation of personal change, those “special types of situations that change not only what we know but also who we are,” Alice Gregory writes, in a Profile of the philosopher for this week’s issue. Childbirth, or going to war, or taking LSD, could be considered a transformative experience. So could divorce, Paul realizes, in the wake of her breakup after twenty-two years with her husband. Paul is now at Yale, and her work has been used by others to examine issues such as gender transitioning, whistle-blowing, treating Alzheimer’s—and it provides a framework for Gregory to reflect on aspects of her own pregnancy. “Choosing to undergo such an experience, on the occasions when choice is even possible,” Gregory notes, “requires us to violate who we take our current self to be.” | 
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