This dissertation focuses on the concept of authenticity and its implications for our projects of self-creation, particularly those involving the use of "enhancement technologies". After an introduction to the concept of authenticity and the enhancement debate in the first part of the thesis, part 2 considers the main analyses of authenticity in the contemporary philosophical literature. It begins with those emphasizing _self-creation_, and shows that, despite their merits, such views cannot adequately deal with certain types of cases, which require (...) a third option, “true self” accounts, emphasizing _self-discovery_. However, it is argued that in their existing versions, accounts of this third sort are also unsatisfactory. Part 3 of the thesis proposes a new account of the "true self" sort, intended to improve upon existing ones. Common problematic assumptions about the concept of the true self are critiqued, after which a new analysis of that concept is presented, based on seven different conditions. Two specific definitions of authenticity, respectively emphasizing self-expression and the preservation of one's true self, are provided, and its relation to various associated notions, such as integrity or sincerity, are examined. Finally, part 4 looks at the implications of the previous parts for the enhancement debate. In particular, it discusses the prospect of technologically enhancing our personality and mood dispositions. Do such interventions always threaten our authenticity, as some worry? A negative answer is provided to that question. Various potential pitfalls hinted at by the inauthenticity worry are discussed and acknowledged. It is, however, argued that such enhancements could still in principle be used in a fully authentic manner, and that they have the potential to bring about genuine improvements in our mood but also to our moral capacities and our affective rationality more generally. (shrink)

In "Unambiguous Calling? Authenticity and Ethics in Heidegger's Being and Time", Tanja Staeler revisits the concept of authenticity in order to investigate several assumptions often taken for granted in secondary literature. She argues that the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity should be read as a methodological and, more precisely, phenomenological distinction. Showing that authenticity cannot really be understood as a state one can be in, she argues that talk of a 'transition' to authenticity is, at best, unhelpful. Her argument, (...) consequently, moves to the notion of the 'call of conscience' in order to investigate the ethical implications of the notion of authenticity. She justifies the unambiguous character of the 'call of conscience' with the help of Lévinas' thought. (shrink)

Despite recognizing the importance of developing authentic corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, noticeably absent from the literature is consideration for how employees distinguish between authentic and inauthentic CSR programs. This is somewhat surprising given that employees are essentially the face of their organization and are largely expected to act as ambassadors for the organization’s CSR program (Collier and Esteban in Bus Ethics 16:19–33, 2007 ). The current research, by conducting depth interviews with employees, builds a better (...) understanding of how employees differentiate between authentic and inauthentic CSR programs, and how these judgments influence their perceptions of the organization. We find that employees rely on two different referent standards to form authenticity judgments—the extent to which the image put forth in the CSR program aligns with the organization’s true identity and the extent to which the CSR program itself is developmental. To assess the former, employees draw on cues about resource commitment, alignment between elements of the organization’s CSR program, emotional engagement, justice, and embeddedness. The latter assessments are based on the extent to which the organization adopts a leadership role with regards to its CSR initiatives. We also find that perceived authenticity can lead to positive outcomes such as organizational identification and employee connections. This study contributes to the broad literatures on both CSR and authenticity, as well as more specifically adding to the conversation on authenticity as a potentially valuable lens for enriching business ethics theorizing. (shrink)

This article will examine how the notion of emotional authenticity is intertwined with the notions of naturalness and artificiality in the context of the recent debates about ‘neuro-enhancement’ and ‘neuro-psychopharmacology.’ In the philosophy of mind, the concept of authenticity plays a key role in the discussion of the emotions. There is a widely held intuition that an artificial means will always lead to an inauthentic result. This article, however, proposes that artificial substances do not necessarily result in inauthentic (...) emotions. The literature provided by the philosophy of mind on this subject usually resorts to thought experiments. On the other hand, the recent literature in applied ethics on ‘enhancement’ provides good reasons to include real world examples. Such case studies reveal that some psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants actually cause people to undergo experiences of authenticity, making them feel ‘like themselves’ for the first time in their lives. Beginning with these accounts, this article suggests three non-naturalist standards for emotions: the authenticity standard, the rationality standard, and the coherence standard. It argues that the authenticity standard is not always the only valid one, but that the other two ways of assessing emotions are also valid, and that they can even have repercussions on the felt authenticity of emotions. In conclusion, it sketches some of the normative implications if not ethical intricacies that accompany the enhancement of emotions. (shrink)

The article focuses on those paragraphs of the famous text Spiritual Situation of our Time by Karl Jaspers in which he approaches the problem of time from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. This text was published in 1931 and saw multiple editions, including the reprint in 1947, which followed the lecture The Question of Guilt. We surmise from this juxtaposition of texts in the new publication that Jaspers believed in the necessity to revisit the problem of the spiritual situation, but (...) he also regarded his conceptualization of temporality viable in the new context and applicable to analyzing this new situation. We corroborate this hypothesis by close reading of the version of the 1947 text. As there exists a wealth of studies of Jasperss philosophy, we aim to explicate his interpretation of personal historicity and to find a reply to the question why it seems necessary to emphasize the appropriation of time. We demonstrate that the existentialist approach Jaspers offers is a universal model for living in the spiritual situation and for appropriating time. The need to appropriate time is inherent in human nature but the capacity to make sense of it and unravel the potential for authentic existence is not. Human beings are often unaware of their choice of certain time appropriation; moreover, human beings lack consistency in constructing the context of their own historicity. We elaborate in greater detail on the meaning of such concepts as spiritual situation, knowledge of the totality, philosophical life. (shrink)

This paper shows that while Sartre's account of love relations in Being and Nothingness is famously conflictual, his Notebooks for an Ethics offers a far more positive account. It pays particular attention to the role that each lover's pre-reflective fundamental project plays in shaping the content of their love relationship.

The paper addresses the question of whether authenticity is a conceptual possibility for Dasein given Heidegger’s insistence in Being and Time that Dasein is necessarily fallen into its mode of everydayness and that fallenness is necessarily inauthentic. By exploring the relationship between Dasein and existentials, I reveal a structure of possibility in allexistentials that provides the seeming paradox a resolution. I use the concept of “logical existentialism” to explore what Heidegger may have meant when he talks of existentials and (...) I look at some passages from The History of the Concept of Time to read propensity as the substance of falling. In the process, l address and discard the only two real attempts in the secondary literature to cope with the paradox: that of Hubert Dreyfus and Rudi Visker.L’article se penche sur la question de savoir si l’authenticité est une possibilité conceptuelle du Dasein, étant donnée I’insistance de Heidegger dans Être et Temps à I’effet que le Dasein est nécessairement déchu dans ses modes de quotidienneté, et que la déchéance est nécessairement inauthentique. À travers I’exploration de la relation entre le Dasein et les existantiaux, je révèle une structure de possibilité dans tous les existantiaux qui permet une résolution du paradoxe apparent. J’utilise le concept d’ «existentialisme logique»pour explorer ce que Heidegger voulait sans doute dire par les existantiaux, et je considère certains passages des The History of the Concept of Time pour interpréter la propension comme substance de la déchéance. Ce faisant, j’aborde et rejette les deux seules tentatives de résolution du paradoxe dans la littérature secondaire: celle de Hubert Dreyfus et de Rudi Visker. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against InauthenticityChristopher S. SchreinerScars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, by Geoffrey Hartman; xii & 260 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. $17.95 paper.Geoffrey Hartman is now an emeritus faculty member at Yale. All but the youngest readers of this journal will recognize him as a member of the now defunct Yale School of Criticism, which in its glory days included (...) Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Among these accomplished individuals, Hartman distinguished himself as the one most engaged with discussing the role of style in theoretically propelled criticism, and this remains his lasting contribution. The question he kept asking was the following: what demands do the books we read and the theories we use make on our own critical practice, and in particular, on our style? Works such as Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) and Saving the Text (1981) were concerned with promoting a philosophical criticism that is as creative as the literature it seeks to criticize, in opposition to the Arnoldian standard of a disinterested criticism that respects and preserves the canonical hauteur of literary classics and doesn't seek to imitate them. Yet over the decades Hartman's own prose, except when it lapsed into copying Derrida's, seemed more that of the Doctor and less the Explorer, to borrow the terms Lionel Trilling used to describe Matthew Arnold's criticism. This is an irony we are grateful for.Hartman's most recent book, Scars of the Spirit, takes up the problem of authenticity in the context of postmodern culture, seeking to reestablish its legitimacy as a serious topic and unmask what merely poses as authentic in the global marketplace. Today his agenda ignominiously crosses paths with the likes of Jane Fonda, whose autobiography is replete with New Age claims to recover "the authentic me." One of the issues never resolved by Hartman's book and which taunts his project behind its back is whether his Continental erudition makes his project any more authentic than Fonda's celebrity psychobabble. Authenticity was the Heideggerian concept that Adorno ruthlessly and ironically attacked in his The Jargon of Authenticity, and it has an old-fashioned existential ring to it to this day. For those readers who haven't read Being and Time lately, authenticity (Jemeinigkeit) was the resolute impetus of making time one's own, taking it back from the instrumental public world that had appropriated it so that one can live a sincerely mortal life and die one's own death, as it were properly. Professors valiantly conjured an ethic out of this retrieval of selfhood, of one's personal property of time and destiny in the Lost and Found of culture, not fully cognizant of its Nietzschean roots. The absence of altruism in this existential ethic inspired Emmanel Levinas's patient attempt to persuade us to demote our egoism in an insatiable responsibility to and for others, for whom we can never do enough.There is surely irony in the fact that the anachrony of authenticity as a concept was accelerated by the deconstructive theory that Hartman helped [End Page 501] promulgate. Hence his new book reads a bit like someone having to gingerly retrace his steps in a field of landmines planted by the Yale School of Criticism. The question of propriety, what is right and proper, what is one's own, stamped with one's unique or authentic properties, was deconstructed by Derrida, and Hartman reverently recorded the results in the incongruously titled Saving the Text, an analysis of Derrida's attempt to promote textual intercourse between Hegel and Jean Genet by setting them in parallel columns on one page. In a nutshell, the original source of an event or text, its material advent, is untraceable due to its derivativeness, the forces of semiosis (or textuality) at play in and between texts. In parallel to this discovery, Jean Baudrillard spoke of the simulacrum as a media-generated version behind which the original "thing itself" was forever irrecoverable. The very idea of authenticity came to sound illusory, denoting a mirage sought in a hopeless regressive inquiry or Ruckfrage which Husserl (with... (shrink)

It is a commonplace of long standing that one should be “authentic” or—in expressions which may have an approximately similar meaning—that one should be “true to oneself” or that one should “lead a life of one’s own”. Duty and morality aside, this command to be “authentic” leads the prudentially-minded reader to ask, “Why? Why should I be authentic, or true to myself, or lead a life of my own? Will I, of necessity, be horribly unhappy if I (...) am not authentic? Is not an inauthentic, but happy life, at least a conceptual possibility? And, if I can be happy though inauthentic, then why should I strive toward authenticity, especially since the psychological literature on this subject makes much of the considerable pain involved in this process?” It is not self-evidently clear, from the prudential point of view, why authenticity is desirable. (shrink)

In this article I have argued that the issue of the effect of education on one getting educated is an ontological one. I make my case with the help of Heidegger's concepts of Dasein, and man's-being-in-the-world. I first argue that tradition is constitutive of one's being, and that man's being is in-a-tradition, and then make the case that education is located in tradition, and that education is a process by which one is initiated into that tradition. As a consequence getting (...) educated in a tradition outside one's own has the effect of dislocating the being of the one getting educated. (shrink)

Several commentators on Kierkegaard and Heidegger have noted the similarity between Heidegger's account of authentic temporality in Being and Time and Kierkegaard's discussion of time in The Concept of Dread. By drawing attention to a not very well known essay of Kierkegaard's, ?The Decisiveness of Death?, I attempt to show that there is a very close connection between Heidegger's and Kierkegaard's entire views on authentic human existence. In the second part I try to locate in The Present Age, (...) not just the equivalent of das Man in Heidegger as numerous commentators have done, but the presence of the entire temporal structure of inauthenticity with equivalents for each of the ?fallen? modes of inauthentic being described by Heidegger in Being and Time. The result is that the previous attempts by commentators to restrict early Heidegger's originality vis?à?vis Kierkegaard begin to look like masterpieces of understatement. In the process of reaching this conclusion I try to shed light on several often misunderstood aspects of Kierkegaard's thought. (shrink)

If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word “authentic.”In 1956, Emmanuel Levinas devoted a provocative essay to the writing of his friend and companion in thought, Maurice Blanchot, entitled “The Poet’s Vision.” Therein, Levinas closely examines Blanchot’s meditations on the origin and essence of the literary work, focusing in particular on the collection of essays assembled together in the book The Space of Literature, which appeared one year beforehand in (...) 1955. His contention, broadly speaking, is that Blanchot’s literary criticism and fiction does not reduce “the limit of the human” to the domain of possibility. Instead, it places into question the definition... (shrink)

In this fascinating collection of essays, noted critic Geoffrey Hartman raises the essential question of where we can find the real or authentic in today's world, and how this affects the way we understand our human predicament. Hartman explores such issues as the fantasy of total information and perfect communication encouraged by the internet, the biographical excesses of tell-all talk shows that serve to shore up a personal sense of unreality, the tendency to motivate violence in the name of (...) some moral or spiritual necessity, and the increased difficulty of distinguishing between fakery and truth in confessional and testimonial writing. Underlying the entire book is the crucial issue of how the trauma of the Holocaust and other genocidal acts, brought home to us almost daily by the media, is shaping our quest for agency, identity and meaning. Against what he describes as a contempt for the aesthetic in the face of social suffering, Hartman produces a defense of art that helps to recast these questions. His idea is that the form of contemplation produced by the aesthetic, and particularly by poetry, resists both the fantasy of data delivering up their own final meaning and of ideology as a shortcut seeking to deliver us from literature and other deeply reflective and sometimes vulnerable--because self-critical--modes of expression. (shrink)

Can we still talk today about a therapeutically dimension of philosophy? To what extent does Heidegger's philosophy exhibit such a dimension? And how can we reconcile this aspect of Heidegger's thought with his political involvement in 1933? These are some of the questions starting from which I will try to show that Heidegger's philosophical thought presupposes indeed a therapeutic that the thinker assumed even in his own life, a life that is not reducible to his 'unforgivable failure' in 1933. I (...) will begin with an account of Being and Time's existential analytic, the main thread of which is the distinction between Dasein's authenticity and inauthenticity. Next I will try to grasp some of the importance of Heidegger's investigation regarding Dasein's determination as a 'thinker and speaker of being (Sein)', that is, regarding ec-sistence. I will then try to account for the meaning of the 'question regarding technology' and implicitly Heidegger's solution regarding overcoming the condition of a 'gregarious slave of Ge-stell' through cultivation of the so-called 'poetic theology.' I will conclude by signaling some life-file elements of the 'faithless monk from the Black Forest' (as Heidegger is sometimes called), elements that signal a certain correspondence between the philosopher's life and the therapeutic aspect present implicitly in his philosophy. (shrink)

Robert C. Neville, Dean of Theology and Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, in his comments on Chuang-Tzu for Spiritual Transformation for the State University of New York press: ‘The present outstanding volume by Robert Allinson ... initiates a new direction ... His new direction for understanding Chuang-Tzu is his comprehensive and detailed argument that Chuang Tzu was advocating an ideal of sageliness. Whereas many interpreters have claimed that Chuang Tzu used his metaphorical language to defend a relativism, Allinson shows with (...) convincing mastery that Chuang Tzu had a position, namely, the importance of achieving the ideal of sageliness ... he brings the discussion of Chuang Tzu into the heart of contemporary Western philosophy. Professor Allinson’s book, like his many articles, contributes to the growing body of literature that is creating an effective dialogue between Chinese and Western philosophy. The sophistication of this book demonstrates that the dialogue has worked and that we are in a new era of substantive comparative philosophy ... he also makes a substantial contribution to the philosophy of religion. Currently in its 8th impression, "Chuang-Tzu for Spiritual Transformation: An Analysis of the Inner Chapters" has been translated into Chinese and Korean. This book offers a fundamentally new interpretation of the philosophy of the Chuang-Tzu. It is the first full-length work of its kind which argues that a deep level cognitive structure exists beneath an otherwise random collection of literary anecdotes, cryptic sayings, and dark allusions. The author carefully analyzes myths, legends, monstrous characters, paradoxes, parables and linguistic puzzles as strategically placed techniques for systematically tapping and channeling the spiritual dimensions of the mind. Allinson takes issue with commentators who have treated the Chuang-Tzu as a minor foray into relativism. Chapter titles are re-translated, textual fragments are relocated, and inauthentic, outer miscellaneous chapters are carefully separated from the transformatory message of the authentic, inner chapters. Each of the inner chapters is shown to be a building block to the next so that they can only be understood as forming a developmental sequence. In the end, the reader is presented with a clear, consistent and coherent view of the Chuang-Tzu that is more in accord with its stature as a major philosophical work. (shrink)

Jesper Ahlin Marceta published an article in this journal in which he formulated his “argument from testability”, stating that it is impossible, at least practically, to operationalize procedural authenticity. That is, using procedural accounts of authenticity, one cannot reliably differentiate between authentic and inauthentic desires. There are roughly two ways to respond to the argument from testability: top-down and bottom-up. Several authors have endeavored the top-down approach by trying to show that some conceptions of authenticity might be operationalizable (...) after all. At present, however, the bottom-up approach has not been put to the test. That is, no attempt has been made to use a currently existing assessment tool to guide the development of an account of authenticity. In this paper, I will investigate what it means to develop an account of authenticity bottom-up based on measures of concordance. More specifically, I will investigate the following three research questions. First, how do concordance and authenticity relate at a conceptual level? As crucial similarities exist between these concepts, concordance measures seem to offer a good starting point for the bottom-up approach. Second, how do judgements of concordance differ from judgements of authenticity? Both their scope and the way they are justified will turn out to be different. This suggests novel ways to react to Marceta’s argument from testability. Third, should we develop a theory of concordance? The positive answer to this question will point towards a central limitation of the bottom-up approach. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Memory and Justice:Narrative Sources of Community in Camus's The First ManJohn Randolph LeBlancThere as a certain frustration involved in trying to find Albert Camus's conception of justice in express positive statements. But inasmuch as Camus saw his work in the trope of journey, his complex set of ideas about justice are to be discerned in the narrative structure of his texts. This is particularly so in his last work, (...) the incomplete autobiographical The First Man.1 In the novel, Camus has his protagonist and fictional self Jacques Cormery seek the sources of his orientation to questions of love and justice by attempting to reconstruct the brief life of a father he never knew. It is in the life reconstructed, chiefly through the recollected memories of those who knew the man that Jacques comes to understand his own responses to questions of love and justice. A necessary by-product of the process is that through his questioning, Jacques recreates a community of which he is a product but, until the journey is undertaken, he has never been a part. His journey is, thus, one of self-discovery and inextricably ties justice to community formation. Camus's last novel, I will argue, suggests the importance of memory and narrative to the fundamental questions of political theory, particularly, questions regarding community-formation and the role and nature of justice.IContemporary reflections on the nature of politics take narrative encounters with reality seriously. The significance of narrative to political theory is, I think, tied to the Augustinian recognition that, temporally speaking, we live forward but learn backwards. It is through reconstructing [End Page 140] our experiences as individuals that we learn about who we are and how we got here. Recent political theory has come to recognize that this epistemological structure works at both the individual and the communal level. Michael Walzer, for example, has suggested that a community's culture is the story its members tell so as to make sense of the different pieces of their social life and justice is the doctrine that distinguishes the pieces.2 But distinguishing the pieces can mean and has meant blocking or restricting our access to that reconstruction. While a time-honored political practice, the impulse to control the contents of the narrative by deeming it unworthy or too dangerous to speak became a self-conscious political practice and a particularly dangerous phenomenon in the last century. Controlling the contents of narrative means control in past, present, and future tense. Memory can become a site of resistance because narrative depends on memory for its points of reference. What gets narrated gets remembered. Most often, what does not get narrated either gets lost or must find another way.Narrative and memory have always been political resources, Joshua Foa Dienstag suggests in his important work on memory and narrative in political theory, but the self-conscious control of them is dangerous.3 At the end of a century wherein we perpetrated much we might be tempted to forget, it is increasingly evident that we must remember before we can speak of justice, that is, our stories must be told and heard before we can reconstitute (or re-member) a functional conception of political community. It is in these terms that I want to talk about narrative and its relationship to political community and justice. But what is silenced is as important as what is articulated. Dienstag, who reads political theory as narrative, suggests that, practically speaking, what we have learned is that memory unarticulated is even more dangerous than memory manipulated. Memory unarticulated either festers and becomes a flashpoint for turmoil or is articulated by an interest for its own ends and becomes a tool of control if not oppression. In either case, memory is bastardized to the ends of power politics and distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic experiences becomes the province of politicians. Leaving these distinctions to politicians, I want to suggest, is risky business. When memory represents the absence of a set of experiences rather than their presence, we are confronted by the end of a community rather than its beginning.All cultures, Walzer suggests, have an interest in... (shrink)

On paper, ‘smart cities’ are an easy sell. Thanks to the transformative power of information and communication technologies (the much-vaunted ‘internet of things’), smart cities purport to offer managers and bureaucrats a more harmonious and efficient means of reducing traffic, managing assets, and increasing public safety. However, I am dubious of these utopian sentiments. Indeed, I argue that the benefits that smart cities purport to provide cohere poorly with a number of our shared phenomenological intuitions about the relationships(s) between (...) class='Hi'>authentic experience and technologised society. While many of these intuitions are, strictly speaking, pseudo-problems, they deserve our attention. The belief that technologised urban spaces somehow corrode our potential for authentic experience is one that carries enormous power, as Charles Taylor argues, authenticity is nothing less than the contemporary moral ideal. Consequently, it indelibly colours the relationships that we forge with our artefacts. These issues will only grow more pressing as our ‘dumb cities’, already so opaque to experience, give way to hyper-technologised ‘smart cities’. -/- However, it is possible to design our way out of these pseudo-problems. Assuming we accept my argument that the distinction between authenticity and the device paradigm is premised upon a certain kind of category error, there is no categorical or definitional reason why it is not possible for urbanised, technologised spaces to feel authentic, whether by virtue of their aesthetic properties, or because they facilitate ‘authentic’ behaviour. Indeed, I argue that ‘inauthenticity’ is an aesthetic rather than an ontological category (much like ‘ugliness’, or ‘boring-ness’), with feelings of inauthenticity serving as evidence of a basic failure of design. Redressing these failures of design requires that we adopt a novel approach to the design and use of technical objects—and particularly when these objects are the almost invisible, semi-autonomous constituents of the ‘smart city’. Consequently, in the concluding analysis of the chapter I outline how the feeling of authenticity can be invoked in the smart city and, consequently, how these failures of design can be avoided. (shrink)

Using Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as primary text to illuminate the human experience of time, it is argued against T. Armstrong (in Modernism) that the depiction of time by Modernist writers such as Woolf is Heideggerian rather than Bergsonian. This study is used to reveal the originality of Heidegger as opposed to Bergson, whose ideas on time, it is suggested, are merely an accumulation of traces of previous ideas on time. Drawing on Aristotle's Metaphysica, De Interpretatione, Ethico Nicomachea, Rhetorica and (...) Physica to develop a new vocabulary, Heidegger revealed the distinctive ontological foundation of space and time in connecting temporality with being. The characters in Mrs. Dalloway illustrate the difference between an authentic and an inauthentic relation to the temporality of being. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}. (shrink)

Meet Tega. Blue, fluffy, and AI-enabled, Tega is a relational robot: a robot designed to form relationships with humans. Created to aid in early childhood education, Tega talks with children, plays educational games with them, solves puzzles, and helps in creative activities like making up stories and drawing. Children are drawn to Tega, describing him as a friend, and attributing thoughts and feelings to him ("he's kind," "if you just left him here and nobody came to play with him, he (...) might be sad"). Scholars and members of the public alike have raised the alarm about relational robots, worrying that the relationships that people, and especially children, form with such robots are objectionably inauthentic. We, members of an interdisciplinary team that developed and studies Tega, make this inauthenticity worry precise and offer practical recommendations for addressing it. We distinguish two kinds of (in)authenticity -- inauthenticity as unreality, and inauthenticity as deception -- arguing that neither is just what others have thought it is. With our distinction in hand, we argue that the authenticity concern can be met only through co-design methods -- methods that give stakeholders of all kinds (e.g. parents, educators, and children themselves) a genuine say in how relational robots are built. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 203 Seiten: 227-248.

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Tony Hope, Jacinta Tan, Anne Stewart, and Ray Fitzpatrick, reporting on twenty-nine interviews they conducted with women with so-called anorexia nervosa, note that the participants recurrently raised issues of authenticity. The paper reflects on the way their behaviors, experiences, and choices can be considered authentic , or inauthentic . The authors also pose a question about the normative implications of their analysis—if some choices are inauthentic, then is it ethical (...) to override them? For example, they suggest that “showing respect” for the sufferer “does not necessarily mean simply acceding to the person’s .. (shrink)

Becoming Langston Hughes -- Producing authentic Blackness -- Authenticity in the blues poetry -- The ethics of compromise -- Simple goes to Washington: Hughes and the McCarthy committee -- "Speak to me now of compromise" : Hughes and the specter of Booker T. -- Appendix A: Hughes's senate testimony in executive session -- Appendix B: Hughes's public testimony.

In this paper I propose to do the following: I will discuss the notions of intentionality and self-understanding of Dasein as developed in Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology. In doing so, I will try to show the interrelation of Dasein's always being intentionally directed towards something and its self-interpretation. As we will see, the everyday world has, for Heidegger, a character of "equipmental contexture." This means that Dasein returns to itself from out of things, equipment, tools, or - quite differently (...) - the work of art. In a word, Dasein is mirrored back toward itself from the things made, from the products of techne. From this will follow the important distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity. There is a sense in which the following pairings could be discerned: tools or pieces of equipment link up with inauthenticity, while the work of art links up with authenticity. I will say more on the subject of tools a bit later in the essay. Both kinds of things are things insofar as they are entrenched in techne. The common root seems almost inexplicable in the light of the vast difference between tools and the artwork. Moreover, both Dasein and techne seem to have another equally enigmatic common root: that of temporality. Temporality is the essential bond between Dasein and the double sense of techne, which suggests the double-sidedness of temporality itself. It is precisely this doublesidedness that I would like to have as the backdrop to my discussion as a whole. Finally, I will turn to a few pages of Heidegger's Being and Time and Bernard Stiegler's book Technics and Time I in order to complicate this notion of the two senses of temporality, the owned and disowned, originary and everyday, and its relation to work and techne. The overarching question here will be: Can the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity be sustained? (shrink)

This essay explores references to monkeys as a way of talking about imitation, authenticity, and identity in Greek stories about the “Monkey Island” Pithekoussai and in Athenian insults, and in Plautus' comedy. In early Greek contexts, monkey business defines what it means to be aristocratic and authoritative. Classical Athenians use monkeys to think about what it means to be authentically Athenian: monkey business is a figure for behavior which threatens democratic culture—sycophancy or other deceptions of the people. Plautus' monkey imagery (...) across the corpus of his plays moves beyond the Athenian use of “monkey” as a term of abuse and uses the “imitative” relation of monkeys to men as a metapoetic figure for invention and play-making. For Plautus, imitator—and distorter—of Greek plays, monkeys' distorted imitations of men are mapped not onto the relations between inauthentic and authentic citizens, as in Athens, but onto the relation of Roman to Greek comedy and culture at large. Monkey business in Plautus is part of the insistence on difference which was always crucial in Roman encounters with Greek culture. (shrink)

This article presents a novel defense of Sartrean ethics based on the concept of interpersonal recognition. The immediate post-war texts Anti-Semite and Jew, What is Literature? and Notebooks for an Ethics express Sartre's inchoate yet ultimately defensible view of obligations to others. Such obligations are not best understood as Kantian duties, but rather as Hegelian obligations of mutual recognition. The emerging portrait of Sartrean ethics offers a strong reply to the classical criticism that authenticity would license vicious lifestyles like (...) serial killing. In addition to acting with clarity and responsibility, existentially authentic individuals must respect others. (shrink)

In the wake of a series of corporate scandals, there has been a growing call for authentic leadership in order to ensure ethical conduct in contemporary organizations. Authentic leadership, however, depends upon the ability to draw a distinction between the authentic and inauthentic leader. This paper uses Deleuze’s discussion of Platonism as a point of departure for critically scrutinizing the problem of authenticating the leader—drawing a distinction between authentic and inauthentic leaders. This will be (...) done through a reading of Bill George’s book Authentic Leadership. Informed by Deleuze’s inverted Platonism, the paper challenges the practice by which authentic leaders are distinguished from inauthentic leaders. In conclusion, the paper suggests that an adequate concept of authentic leadership should consider how ethics can occur when the authentic leader is able to critically reflect his or her own value-commitments. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore political identity for African Americans in an era where the stated aim of the U.S. is global dominance. In ordinary language, I am interested in how blacks can effectively engage in dissent, civil disobedience, protest, insurrection, and revolutionary actions while surviving in an atmosphere where the majority believe either Bush I’s “A friend of my enemy is my enemy,” or Bush II’s “If you harbor terrorists, you’re a terrorist; if you aid and abet terrorists, you’re (...) a terrorist—and you’ll be treated like one.” This paper attempts to interrogate how African Americans—who identify with globally oppressed and distressed peoples—can survive while actively protesting within an armed camp. Or does being black in America mean that one is either a terrorist sympathizer or anUncle Tom? The answers to these questions require a coalition of the unwilling. (shrink)

What do we ordinarily mean when we describe people as authentic or inauthentic? We describe friends, enemies, acquaintances, and colleagues as authentic and inauthentic, as well as politicians, celebrities, and other public figures. What are we saying about someone, when we say that they are authentic or inauthentic? I argue that authenticity is transparency: that you are authentic to the extent that you are transparent and inauthentic to the extent that you are (...) opaque. I contrast my account with three alternative accounts of authenticity: the view that authenticity is fidelity to your true self, the view that authenticity is a species of selfknowledge, and the view that authenticity is a species of non-conformity. I will argue that my proposed account, unlike its rivals, can explain a basic intuition about personal authenticity: that people who are fakes – i.e. phonies or poseurs – are inauthentic people. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against the interpretive view that locates an “undifferentiated mode” – a mode in which Dasein is neither authentic nor inauthentic – in Being and Time. Where Heidegger seems to be claiming that Dasein can exist in an “undifferentiated mode”, he is better understood as discussing a phenomenon I call indifferent inauthenticity. The average everyday “Indifferenz” which is often taken as an indication of an “undifferentiated mode”, that is, is better understood as a failure (...) to distinguish between the possibilities of authentic and inauthentic self-understanding. Dasein's average everyday self-understanding is indifferent to this distinction, and I show that this is precisely what renders it inauthentic. Recognizing this distinction, however, is not enough to render Dasein authentic. Rather, it opens up the possibility of a non-indifferent inauthenticity and what Heidegger calls the possibility of “genuine failure”. To read an “undifferentiated mode” into Being and Time is to misunderstand its methodological progression from Dasein's average everyday, inauthentic self-understanding to its authenticity – “to the thing itself”. A select few passages may at first seem to indicate otherwise. However, Being and Time – like both being in general and Dasein itself – cannot be properly understood “without further ado”.\. (shrink)

In this article, I explore select case studies of Parkinson patients treated with deep brain stimulation in light of the notions of alienation and authenticity. While the literature on DBS has so far neglected the issues of authenticity and alienation, I argue that interpreting these cases in terms of these concepts raises new issues for not only the philosophical discussion of neuro-ethics of DBS, but also for the psychological and medical approach to patients under DBS. In particular, I suggest (...) that the experience of alienation and authenticity varies from patient to patient with DBS. For some, alienation can be brought about by neurointerventions because patients no longer feel like themselves. But, on the other hand, it seems alienation can also be cured by DBS as other patients experience their state of mind as authentic under treatment and retrospectively regard their former lives without stimulation as alienated. I argue that we must do further research on the relevance of authenticity and alienation to patients treated with DBS in order to gain a deeper philosophical understanding, and to develop the best evaluative criterion for the behavior of DBS patients. (shrink)

Ways of Being Free: Introduction -- War Is Everything's Father: History and Death as Causes of Existential Angst -- Introduction: Causes of Existential Angst -- Change and Changelessness in Midnight's Children -- The Road of Existential Struggle in The Famished Road -- History and the "Nervous Condition" in The English Patient -- Death as a Drive to Meaningful Existence in Midnight's Children -- Becoming Dead-to-the-World in The English Patient -- Ideological Re-appropriation through Death in The Famished Road -- Authenticity -- (...) Authenticity: Introduction -- From Self-Sufficiency to Inoperative Community in The English Patient -- Revolution Revisited in The Famished Road -- From Communalism to the Comic Absurd in Midnight's Children. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to elucidate the bright connotation of the self-conscious emotion of pride, namely authentic pride, in the broader context of behavioral governance literature. Scholars in the field of psychology suggest that authentic and hubristic pride represent two facets of the same emotional construct. Yet, our review indicates that in the extant governance research pride has been treated as an exclusively dark leadership trait or self-attribution bias, thereby placing hubris among the main (...) causes of managerial failure. After conceptually differentiating the two aspects of pride, we identify and discuss the myriad of positive governance implications stemming from firm members' tendency toward authentic pride. We argue that the examination of both positive and negative facets of pride constitutes a critical complement to the existing governance landscape largely dominated by economic theories and formal mechanisms of control. This article allows practitioners to better understand the emotional processes involved in governance that are needed to predict the workplace effectiveness of employees, identify individuals prone to experience authentic pride in the early stages of the recruitment process, and design specific interventions for acting upon and putting emotional energy into productive use. (shrink)

The notion of authenticity, i.e., being “genuine,” “real,” or “true to oneself,” is sometimes held as critical to a person’s autonomy, so that inauthenticity prevents the person from making autonomous decisions or leading an autonomous life. It has been pointed out that authenticity is difficult to observe in others. Therefore, judgments of inauthenticity have been found inadequate to underpin paternalistic interventions, among other things. This article delineates what justifies judgments of inauthenticity. It is argued that for persons who wish to (...) live according to the prevailing social and moral standards and desires that are seriously undesirable according to those standards, it is justified to judge that a desire is inauthentic to the extent that it is due to causal factors that are alien to the person and to the extent that it deviates from the person’s practical identity. The article contributes to a tradition of thinking about authenticity which is known mainly from Frankfurt and Dworkin, and bridges the gap between theoretical ideals of authenticity and real authenticity-related problems in practical biomedical settings. (shrink)

Catholics normally approach the Eucharist with great love and devotion. The paper looks at how, through the character, Papa, the reality of this love and devotion to the Eucharist is captured by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Adichie, in her novel, Purple Hibiscus . The novel reveals that while Papa, in various ways, shows great love and devotion to Christ in the Eucharist, his devotion remains inauthentic: it does not lead him to a love of this same Christ in his (...) neighbour. The work, therefore, underscores not only the nexus between theology and creative literature, but also, in a special way, the social implications of the Eucharist. (shrink)

The aim of this doctoral thesis is to bridge the gap between theoretical ideals of authenticity and practical authenticity-related problems in healthcare. In this context, authenticity means being "genuine," "real," "true to oneself," or similar, and is assumed to be closely connected to the autonomy of persons. The thesis includes an introduction and four articles related to authenticity. The first article collects various theories intended to explain the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity in a taxonomy that enables oversight and analysis. (...) It is argued that (in-)authenticity is difficult to observe in others. The second article offers a solution to this difficulty in one theory of authenticity. It is proposed that under certain circumstances, it is morally justified to judge that the desires underlying a person's decisions are inauthentic. The third article incorporates this proposition into an already established theory of personal autonomy. It is argued that the resulting conceptualization of autonomy is fruitful for action-guidance in authenticity-related problems in healthcare. The fourth article collects nine cases of possible authenticity-related problems in healthcare. The theory developed in the third article is applied to the problems, when this is allowed by the case-description, to provide guidance with regard to them. It is argued that there is not one universal authenticity-related problem but many different problems, and that there is thus likely not one universal solution to such problems but various particular solutions. (shrink)

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an invasive therapeutic method involving the implantation of electrodes and the electrical stimulation of specific areas of the brain to modulate their activity. DBS brings therapeutic benefits, but can also have adverse side effects. Recently, neuroethicists have recognized that DBS poses a threat to the very fabric of human existence, namely, to the selves of patients. This article provides a review of the neuroethical literature examining this issue, and identifies the crucial dimensions related to (...) the self which DBS may endanger—personal identity, authenticity, and autonomy. The most influential theories accounting for these dimensions are analyzed herein, and it is argued that most of these theories require further refinement. This paper also demonstrates the interrelation between personal identity, authenticity, and autonomy, and concludes that one can only fully understand the impact of DBS on the self when all of these factors are taken into account. (shrink)

This paper arises out of the transition from a PhD thesis on Heidegger's phenomenology to my attempts to come to terms with 'becoming a teacher'. The paper will provide a phenomenological interpretation of being a teacher in relation to the question of an 'authentic' interpretation of teaching/learning and the possibility of an authentic interpretative praxis. I will argue that being a teacher is a phenomenon of human existence which can be interpreted as a possible way of being with (...) authentic and inauthentic potentialities. This way of being is intrinsically linked to that of learning; of becoming human or becoming the authentic possibilities of being-human. As such, the problem of being a teacher is primarily an ethical question (or a question of ɛτηοσ—dwelling); of who we are as humans and of how being a teacher engages with the in-formation of the becoming of students as authentic human beings. This then leads to the problem of how a phenomenological interpretation of education can be applied or lived; of authenticity in teaching/learning and the possibilities of authentic learning environments (educational dwelling). (shrink)

Customers are increasingly talking positively about brands that are socially responsible and authentic. However, little empirical research has related corporate social responsibility (CSR) to brand authenticity and brand authenticity to customers’ positive word-of-mouth. Moreover, although highly attractive alternative brands are increasingly appearing in the marketplace, there is a lack of research examining the role of alternative attractiveness in the relationship between CSR and brand authenticity. We address these shortcomings in the literature drawing on data from 1,101 customers of (...) insurance services brands and analyze them using structural equation modeling. The findings show that CSR is positively related to customers’ positive word-of-mouth, both directly and indirectly, through brand authenticity. Moreover, alternative attractiveness positively moderates the effect of CSR on brand authenticity. This implies that CSR can act as a differentiation mechanism to further enhance the focal brand’s authenticity, when an alternative brand is perceived as highly attractive. (shrink)

Traditionally, phenomenology has understood the self in light of intentionality and hence the world. However, contemporary French phenomenology—as represented here by Jean-Luc Marion—contends that this view of subjectivity is open to challenge: our mode of existence is not simply one of “being-in the-world.” I develop this claim by examining Marion’s reformulation of the reduction. Here, the phenomenon of vanity is key. I first present Husserl’s and Heidegger’s own formulations of the reduction. Following Marion, I show that the blow of vanity (...) neutralizes both, by undercutting the respective questions to which they respond. For, in response to vanity’s own question—“What’s the use?”—neither the transcendental nor ontological reductions have a reply. Vanity consequently renders the Heideggerian distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity existentially moot. To establish this, I evaluate how existing interpretations of authenticity overlook the phenomenon of vanity. Phenomenology, I urge in conclusion, should shift its attention to the horizons opened by Marion’s erotic reduction. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to examine the relationships between authenticity, subjective happiness, and life satisfaction. The participants were 347 university students. In this study, the Authenticity Scale, the Subjective Happiness Scale, and Satisfaction with Life Scale were used. The relationships between authenticity, subjective happiness and life satisfaction were examined using correlation analysis and Structural Equation Model. In correlation analysis, authentic living was found positively related to subjective happiness. On the other hand, self-alienation, accepting external influence was found (...) negatively correlated to subjective happiness. Besides subjective happiness and life satisfaction have positive relation. Structural Equation Model showed that self-alienation, accepting external influence results in a decrease subjective happiness on life satisfaction whereas rise in authentic living lead to subjective happiness, so subjective happiness also brings life satisfaction. According to standardized beta coefficients, the most significant predictor of subjective happiness was self-alienation. Results were discussed in the light of the related literature. (shrink)

Little is known about how and why corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged in lesser developed countries. In order to address this knowledge gap, we used Chile as a test case and conducted a series of in-depth interviews with leaders of CSR initiatives. We also did an Internet and literature search to help provide support for the findings that emerged from our data. We discovered that while there are similarities in the drivers of CSR in developed countries, there are distinct (...) differences as well. In particular, we found that different sectors drive CSR in Chile. In contrast to other geographies where consumer demand and government regulation provided the impetus for CSR efforts, multinational companies (MNCs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are key actors in Chile. MNCs imported their CSR beliefs, skills, and processes into Chile. Their efforts resulted in a virtuous cycle. Once large domestic firms felt pressured by their MNC rivals, they too adopted CSR initiatives. The ability to manage relationships with multiple stakeholders and perceptions of authenticity were also critical to the success of CSR in Chile. Using network theory as a lens, we suggest that network density and centrality largely determine whether CSR efforts will be authentic. Based on these contentions, we suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)