In this personal tribute to Pamela Sue Anderson, based on many conversations, I try out the idea that she was seeking to locate an underlying metaphysical and ethical unity that makes our human vulnerability, love and reflective self-understanding both possible and intelligible. I trace this unity in Pamela’s philosophical imaginary to resonances or retrievals from three philosophers who featured in her “internal dialogues”: Spinoza, Kant and Levinas. I also allude to the great influence on Pamela and myself of our mutual (...) friend Adrian Moore. My thought is that Pamela was pursuing something fundamental about our humanity as open, creative, fluid and risky becoming rather than being. I suggest that she found kinship with Spinoza’s thinking of vulnerability and love together and his vision of underlying unities to make sense of ourselves. In Kant’s First Critique, I suggest that she found a unified deduction of the possibility of objectivity and subjectivity and that she also traced in his moral philosophy the richer conception of ourselves offered by the “humanity” version of the categorical imperative and by the joint origin of the objectivity of the moral law and the subjectivity of our moral agency. These resources made room for human vulnerability, self-love and the love of others within the scope of the Kantian project. Of the three philosophers, Levinas was closest to Pamela’s perception of vulnerability and love and her conception of gendered human selves living lives of complex becoming rather than of being. His fusion of morality and metaphysics and the unity of his post-phenomenological deduction of subjectivity and saying bring into focus the influences I discern. (shrink)

This volume is the first attempt to engage with the work of one of the most exciting thinkers or our times. The essays in the first section by Nandy are either autobiographical in nature or provide insights into his unique sensibility. The later section offers some analytical perspectives on Nandy's work by contributors including leading scholars in the academy, as well as outside it.

Open-mindedness is widely regarded as an epistemic virtue and, more recently, a moral one: its exercise is supposed to be conducive not only to the acquisition of epistemic goods such as truth, knowledge, and understanding, but also to the development of moral goods such as the promotion of social cohesion and the fostering of people’s respect and care for one another. This glossy view of open-mindedness, however, has come under challenge. Critics have argued that adopting a default stance (...) of openness can be detrimental to our epistemic and moral selves, especially in today’s world where fake news, attacks on the idea of truth, and blatant lies abound. The articles in this symposium by Howard Curzer and Jessica Gottlieb and by Matt Ferkany represent some of these challenges. Concerned with the question of when it is safe to exercise open-mindedness, both seek to identify the potential hazards that may arise as a result being open-minded and to propose ways to curtail those hazards. In this paper, I will assess each of their arguments in turn. (shrink)

Advanced biological brains are by nature open-ended opportunistic controllers. Such controllers compute, pretty much on a moment-to-moment basis, what problem-solving resources are readily available and recruit them into temporary problem-solving wholes. Neural plasticity, exaggerated in our own species, makes it possible for such resources to become factored deep into both our cognitive and physical problem-solving routines. One way to think about this is to depict the biological brain as a master of what I shall dub ‘ecological control’. Ecological control (...) is the kind of top-level control that does not micro-manage every detail, but rather encourages substantial devolvement of power and responsibility. This kind of control allows much of our skill at walking to reside in the linkages and elastic properties of muscles and tendons. And it allows much of our prowess at thought and reason to depend upon the robust and reliable operation, often in dense brain-involving loops, of a variety of non-biological problem-solving resources spread throughout our social and technological surround. Are the complex distributed systems that result in some sense ‘out of control’, beyond the reach of useful governance? I shall argue that they are not, although understanding them requires us to re-think some key ideas about control and the nature of the self. To make this case, I shall first examine some strategies for efficient, external opportunity exploiting control in simple systems. I shall then argue that many of the same lessons apply to the case of higher-level human problem-solving. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought IIDavid Cunning and Seth JonesMichael Moriarty. Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii + 430. Cloth, $125.00.This book is the second of two volumes on a myriad of issues surrounding the early modern distinction between the embodied self and the immaterial self that is one of its components. (...) One of the theses of the book is that, although canonical philosophers like Descartes and Malebranche hold that it is in some sense the latter that is our true self, and although they expend a significant amount of their corpus trying to help us to touch base with it, they also offer well-developed and insightful views about our embodiment and about what we are to do as embodied beings. Another thesis of the book is that, even if early modern philosophers tend to think that we have unimpeded and transparent access to our psychological states after we have done enough reflection to keep our embodiment from restricting the view, a concomitant position in the period is that we otherwise have very little self-knowledge. A related thesis is that important elements of the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud and Lacan can be traced back to philosophers like Descartes and Malebranche and to the investigations that they inspire in their contemporaries and successors. The book is ambitious and is an extremely interesting and important contribution.Descartes holds that as a result of the bad habits of childhood we come to misrepresent external bodies as having qualities like color, smell, taste, and sound. Building on the work of volume one, Moriarty (5, 335–36, 372–73, 243–44) reminds us that Descartes also holds that we come to misrepresent our minds as in part tangible and corporeal (the Second Meditation, Second Replies) and that the Cartesian project of clarifying ideas is not restricted to the ideas of natural science. Indeed, Moriarty could also cite Descartes’s remark that there are circumstances in which we might report that we are thinking of our selves when in fact we are only thinking of our bodies (Principles of Philosophy I:12). Descartes seems to allow that if we are not sufficiently reflective and observant, our thinking is not transparent to us, and if so he is leaving open the view that we can mischaracterize our own psychological states. Descartes does not speak explicitly to this kind of mischaracterization, but in later writings (especially Passions of the Soul and the letters to Princess Elizabeth) he does speak to the importance of clearly defining the passions and distinguishing them, and to the importance of knowing the relationships between brain traces and particular passions so that we can understand our motivations and get a better handle on them (315). Moriarty then brings to the table a number of figures who develop these positions. In Nicole, we find the view that, from the first-person perspective, it can be very difficult to distinguish acting from charity and acting from self-love, and that we have a considerable interest in identifying ourselves as acting from the former (219–24). In La Rochefoucauld, we find the view that friendship is often a matter of wanting to see a certain image of ourselves reflected in and confirmed by others and that true friendship is very rare (243). We might focus on figures like Nicole insofar as they engage the more traditional questions of metaphysics and epistemology, but issues of embodiment and self-knowledge were also front and center in the early modern period, and the contributions of Nicole, Lamy, La Rochefoucauld, and Senault (just to name just a few) are enormous.Another strength of the book is that it highlights the systematic nature of early modern work on self-knowledge. For example, Moriarty not only considers the empirical psychology of thinkers like Nicole and Lamy, but also shows how their results are grounded in fully articulated views of habit, language, and imagination (361–63, 371–74). Of course, these views are Cartesian as well.The book also has some potential problems. Some philosophers might worry that it is a stretch... (shrink)

Advanced biological brains are by nature open-ended opportunistic controllers. Such controllers compute, pretty much on a moment-to-moment basis, what problem-solving resources are readily available and recruit them into temporary problem-solving wholes. Neural plasticity, exaggerated in our own species, makes it possible for such resources to become factored deep into both our cognitive and physical problem-solving routines. One way to think about this is to depict the biological brain as a master of what I shall dub ‘ecological control’. Ecological control (...) is the kind of top-level control that does not micro-manage every detail, but rather encourages substantial devolvement of power and responsibility. This kind of control allows much of our skill at walking to reside in the linkages and elastic properties of muscles and tendons. And it allows much of our prowess at thought and reason to depend upon the robust and reliable operation, often in dense brain-involving loops, of a variety of non-biological problem-solving resources spread throughout our social and technological surround. Are the complex distributed systems that result in some sense ‘out of control’, beyond the reach of useful governance? I shall argue that they are not, although understanding them requires us to re-think some key ideas about control and the nature of the self. To make this case, I shall first examine some strategies for efficient, external opportunity exploiting control in simple systems. I shall then argue that many of the same lessons apply to the case of higher-level human problem-solving. (shrink)

In an age when "we are all multiculturalists now," as Nathan Glazer has said, the politics of identity has come to pose new challenges to our liberal polity and the presuppositions on which it is founded. Just what identity means, and what its role in the public sphere is, are questions that are being hotly debated. In this book Susan Hekman aims to bring greater theoretical clarity to the debate by exposing some basic misconceptions—about the constitution of the self that (...) defines personal identity, about the way liberalism conceals the importance of identity under the veil of the "abstract citizen," and about the difference and interrelationship between personal and public identity. Hekman’s use of object relations theory allows her to argue, against the postmodernist resort to a "fictive" subject, for a core self that is socially constructed in the early years of childhood but nevertheless provides a secure base for the adult subject. Such a self is social, particular, embedded, and connected—a stark contrast to the neutral and disembodied subject posited in liberal theory. This way of construing the self also opens up the possibility for distinguishing how personal identity functions in relation to public identity. Against those advocates of identity politics who seek reform through the institutionalization of group participation, Hekman espouses a vision of the politics of difference that eschews assigning individuals to fixed groups and emphasizes instead the fluidity of choice arising from the complex interaction between the individual’s private identity and the multiple opportunities for associating with different groups and the public identities they define. Inspired by Foucault’s argument that "power is everywhere," Hekman maps out a dual strategy of both political and social/cultural resistance for this new politics of identity, which recognizes that with significant advances already won in the political/legal arena, attitudinal change in civil society presents the greatest challenge for achieving more progress today in the struggle against racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. (shrink)

Instead of wondering about the nature of robots, as if our thinking about humans was stable and straightforward, we should dig deeper in thinking about how we think about humans. Indeed, the emotions embedded in the ethical approaches to robots and artificial intelligence, are rooted in a long tradition of thinking about humans, either in an instrumental or in a pseudo-divine way. Both perspectives miss humanness, and are misleading when it comes to thinking about robots and their relationships with humans. (...) With the instrumental way to grasp humanness, humans are seen as machines and, by the same token, robots can easily be seen as human, as a matter of fact. With the quasi-divine way to grasp humanness, humans are seen as aspiring omniscient-omnipotent creatures and, by the same token, robots are projected to be, what men will always fail to become. Hence, our way to think about robots is mirroring our way to think about humans…as long as we hold rationality as a distinctive criteria for humanness. The text below flows from a TEDxULB talk that took place in Brussels on May 4, 2016. It calls for leaving behind the rational subject as proxy for humanness, and embracing instead the figure of the relational self. The relational self is rooted in the Arendtian concept of plurality. Embracing the relational self, instead of the rational subject, has several advantages: it allows to distinguish humans from artefacts; it allows to grasp the dynamics between control, orientation, and recognition and to understand how human freedom flows from this dynamics; it opens to the foregrounding of vulnerability, as a shared characteristic of humanness, instead of as a defect touching only some; last, and surely not least, it points to a new form of vulnerability: that of our attentional spheres, whose protection may deserve a new fundamental right, in order to ensure our integrity, besides and beyond body and home. (shrink)

The concept of karma is one of the most general and basic for the philosophical traditions of India, one of an interconnected cluster of concepts that form the basic presuppositions of Indian philosophy. And like many general, pervasive, and basic philosophical concepts, the idea of karma exhibits both semantic complexity and a certain fluidity and open texture. That is, the concept may not have a determinate application in all possible cases, it can be fleshed out in quite different ways (...) in different contexts and philosophical traditions, and it should be understood as open in its future applications. Thus, any complete account of the concept of karma must take into consideration its diverse uses across .. (shrink)

The reaction to multiple religious belonging has been fraught with anxiety in the monotheistic traditions. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of people report belonging to multiple religions. I propose that it is most useful to think of multiple religious belonging not so much as an expression of choice, but just the opposite. Multiple religious belonging is best explained as the ontological condition of two or more religious traditions constituting the self, so that the self’s possibilities are constrained by those religions. Furthermore, I (...) argue that multiple religious belonging per se does not threaten traditional religious communities. Threats are by definition future possibilities, and ontologically speaking, we always already belong to multiple religions. We belong to multiple religions because every religious tradition is an amalgam of earlier distinct traditions. There is nothing new about multiple religious belonging. It is nearly unremarkable. Two philosophers in particular-one a twentieth-century German phenomenologist, the other a second-century Indian Buddhist-have given particularly careful examination of the phenomenon of belonging. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of Wirkungsgeschichte [history of effects] and Nāgārjuna’s teaching of śūnyatā [emptiness] both imply that multiple religious belonging is the ontological condition of all human beings, and that producing any monolithic religious identity requires significant mental gymnastics. (shrink)

This collection of aphorisms and thoughts gathers 30 years of observations about the external world and on the nature of our internal selves. Compiled from scraps of paper dating from the early 1970s, these bits of wisdom include notes about the world around us that are often thought, but not often said; sightings of internal vistas and omens; and observations on music, the passage of time, America, the body, domesticity, and intimacy.

Malebranche holds that the feeling of having a body comes in three main varieties. A perceiver sensorily experiences herself (1) as causally connected to her body, in so far as the senses represent the body as causing her sensory experiences and as uniquely responsive to her will, (2) as materially connected to her body, in so far as the senses represent the perceiver as a material being wrapped up with the body, and (3) as perspectivally connected to her body, in (...) so far as the external senses represent the world from the body’s perspective. In addition to distinguishing these varieties of embodied experience, I explain why the perceiver experiences her connection to the body in these ways. Although Malebranche often casts the experience of embodiment in a negative light, his considered view is that this experience contributes to our survival and salvation. (shrink)

The temporal period between the moment of deliberation and the execution of the intention varies widely—from opening an umbrella when one feels the first raindrops hit to planning and writing a book. I investigate the distinctive ability that adult human beings have to deliberate for their far future selves exhibited at the latter end of this temporal spectrum, which I term prospective deliberation. What grounds it when it is successful? And, why does it fail in some cases? I shall (...) argue that an agent is warranted in deliberating for a future self when her reasons give her the right kind of cross-temporal authority. I argue that this authority is distinctive and cannot be accounted for by theories of agential authority that take desires, value judgments, or willings as the ground of authority in standard cases of deliberation. According to the theory I propose having the right kind of cross-temporal agential authority is not only a matter of having epistemic access to a future self’s reasons or being the same metaphysical person as a future self, it requires confidence that the agent’s reasons support undertaking such a normative commitment and that that future self will see the normative force of those reasons as the agent sees them. In other words, cross-temporal agential authority requires that the past self and the future self share a normative perspective. I show that this further condition only obtains if the agent sees her reasons in deliberation as having certain features. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French NovelDaniel GordonSkeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel, by Elena Russo; 225 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, $35.00.Skeptical Selves explains how linguistic relativism has shaped French literature from the Enlightenment to the present. Elena Russo provides three cases: Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne (1740), Constant’s Adolphe (1816), and des Forêts’s Le Bavard (1946). Her (...) fascinating scholarly goal is to portray the inexorable decline of the novel in a climate of ever growing doubt about the truthfulness of narration. Her remarkably ambitious philosophical goal is to save the novel by refuting skepticism!More precisely, Russo’s target is not every form of doubt but rather a specific current of French skeptical consciousness. In recent years, the representatives of this current have been Derrida and Blanchot. Its main feature is a denial of the correspondence notion of the language-truth relationship combined—paradoxically—with an intense nostalgia for a perfectly mimetic language that has allegedly been lost. The seemingly most radical critics of the sign, Russo claims, never overcome the perverse yearning for the very mimesis whose possibility they deny (p. 3).Russo is getting at an interesting distinction here, the distinction between epistemological modesty, which she upholds, and French skepticism, which she deplores. Epistemological modesty means the redefinition of truth according to some criterion other than perfect representation of the external world. French skepticism for her means the insistence on an absolute standard of mimetic reliability and a simultaneous denial that this standard can ever be reached. “Much of the language of negativity we have grown accustomed to in contemporary criticism rests upon the following syllogism: to know is to know directly and without mediation; this is not possible; therefore, the world is unknowable. Any conceptualization is ipso facto viewed as suspect, hence the flight towards nonverbal forms of expression, such as music and silence” (p. 13).After suggesting in her first chapter that French skepticism is a specific style of thought, not a final answer to our epistemological queries, Russo goes on to illustrate the impact of this skepticism on the novel. Prévost’s text, she observes, is one of the first novels built around the distorted point of view of a fallible [End Page 179] narrator. The narrator is the French ambassador to Constantinople who falls in love with a woman, Théophé, recently freed from a seraglio. Both his love and his comprehension are frustrated by the woman’s apparent simplicity and virtue. “Signs acquire a meaning opposite to their manifest one,” Russo notes. “It is precisely the discourse that should have made Théophé look credible that makes her appear suspicious. She is cunning and deceptive because she appears ‘naive’ and ‘innocent’; she is opaque because of her ‘simplicity’ and ‘openness’” (p. 42). The whole point of the novel is to show that we are imprisoned in subjectivity and there is no way out. For a time the narrator attempts to resolve his doubts regarding Théophé’s words by concentrating instead on her body. But here as well he can discover only ambiguity: nothing reveals clearly whether she is conquerable and whether she already has another lover.The novel ends with the unexplained death of Théophé, and Russo comments: “we are given the impression that, rather than ending his text, Prévost is ridding himself of an intractable problem” (p. 66). Artfully, the rest of the book helps us see that the tendency to thematize philosophical problems that have no solutions is intensified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to the point where not merely the ending of novels but novels themselves disappear. (Of course, Russo means not that people no longer write novels but that the genre has succeeded in diminishing its own stature by so frequently decrying the limits of language.)The chapter on Constant did not strike me as the strongest part of the book. The problem is due perhaps to the fact that Constant was a truly great thinker, a brilliant political theorist and philosopher of religion as well as a romantic novelist. One chapter does not... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to bring philosophical thinking closer to practice-based empirical work. Using Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, it offers a bridge between these two worlds, attempting to provide philosophical depth to the findings of a hermeneutic phenomenological study. This process unfolded through the appearance of three intertwined, potential, meaningful modes of being in the lifeworld: space as a condition for being and being for worlding the world; temporal and spatial self-being, the existence of multiple selves in (...) time and space; and suffering and thriving as modes of being. The article extends the dialogue and concludes with key reflections and insight for research practice. (shrink)

Most recent accounts of personal autonomy acknowledge that the social environment a person lives in, and the personal relationships she entertains, have some impact on her autonomy. Two kinds of conceptualizing social conditions are traditionally distinguished in this regard: Causally relational accounts hold that certain relationships and social environments play a causal role for the development and on-going exercise of autonomy. Constitutively relational accounts, by contrast, claim that autonomy is at least partly constituted by a person’s social environment or standing. (...) The central aim of this paper is to raise the question how causally and constitutively relational approaches relate to the fact that we exercise our autonomy over time. I argue that once the temporal scope of autonomy is opened up, we need not only to think differently about the social dimension of autonomy. We also need to reconsider the very distinction between causally and constitutively relational accounts, because it is itself a synchronic (and not a diachronic) distinction. (shrink)

Collected and edited by Noah Levin -/- Table of Contents: -/- UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The Ethics of our (...) Digital Selves (Noah Levin) -/- UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) -/- UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) -/- UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) -/- UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko). (shrink)

In this exploratory study, we present findings from semi-structured interviews with 11 self-identified lesbian and gay (LG) humanitarian aid workers of Doctors without Borders (MSF). We investigate their perceptions of workplace inclusion in terms of perceived satisfaction of their needs for authenticity and belonging within two organizational settings, namely office and field. Through our combined deductive and inductive approach, based on grounded theory, we find that perceptions of their colleagues’ and supervisors’ attitudes and behaviors, as well as organizational inclusiveness practices (...) play a role in LGs’ perceived authenticity, but not belonging, in the workplace. However, these organization-level characteristics do not account for between-participant differences in perceived authenticity. Therefore, we inductively construct a typology of three groups, which we coined conscious first-missioners, authentic realists, and idealistic activists, based on how LG humanitarian aid workers assess and deal with not being able to be their authentic selves when they are in the field, because homosexuality is illegal in many project countries. Conscious first-missioners are separated from the other two groups based on having gone to the field once, whereby they felt in control over the decision on how to manage their sexuality. Alternatively, authentic realists and idealistic activists alike felt they did not really have a choice in how to manage their sexuality, but handled that differently. We find the importance of one’s sexuality as well as adherence to the overarching organizational mission relevant individual-level factors herein. Furthermore, we find disclosure of sexual identity to be strongly context-dependent, as participants are ‘out of the closet’ in the office, but go back into the closet when they enter the field, with different country contexts even leading to different decisions concerning self-disclosure, thus demonstrating the importance of careful sexual identity management. This so-called disclosure dilemma, we find, may not be merely an individual choice, but rather a shared dilemma involving multiple stakeholders, such as the organization and fellow team members. We discuss the findings’ contributions to existing literature on LGs’ workplace experiences and implications for future research on inclusion of sexual and other invisible minorities in the workplace. (shrink)

This article elaborates on a view of human subjectivity as open and intersubjectively constituted and discusses it as a presupposition for student's participation in educational situations. It questions the traditional persistent concept of subjectivity as inner and private, the homo clausus, which puts self realization before recognition of the other and individual cognition before mutual meaning. From the perspective of homo clausus participation is thus limited to mere situated activity. A concept of human subjectivity as open and plural, (...) homines aperti, makes it possible to conceptualize educational situations relationally and to take the in‐between as point of departure for understanding pedagogical relationships. Participation can then be understood in terms of involvement in meaning making, knowledge construction and mutual will formation. The relevance of analyzing discrepancies between concepts in educational theory is that they direct our interest and our attention differently. This is also how theoretical understandings work in the praxis of teaching; teachers’ actions are certainly not guided by their theories, but their conceptions about such basic issues as subjectivity and self make some actions and decisions seem more intelligible than others. (shrink)

Literature cultivates "deep selves" for whom books matter because they take over from religion fundamental questions about the meaning of existence. This volume embraces and questions this perspective, while also developing a "new humanist' critical vocabulary which specifies, and therefore opens to debate, the human significance of literature.

It is a striking feature of philosophical reflection on the self that it often ends up being revisionary of our commonsensical intuition that it is identical to a living human being with, intrinsically, physical and psychological properties. As is well known, Descartes identified the self with a mental entity, Hume denied the existence of such an entity and Kant reduced it to a transcendental ego—to a mere condition of possibility for experience and thought. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein followed Kant —or, (...) at any rate, the Kant made available to him through reading Schopenhauer—then, later, denied the existence of such an entity and proposed the no-reference view about at least some uses of “I”. Finally, Anscombe radicalized Wittgenstein’s views and claimed that no use of “I” is ever referential. It must be acknowledged that, despite the oddity of these views, philosophers have always arrived at their respective positions on the nature of the self through rational reflection: being impressed with some feature allegedly special to the use of “I” they have felt compelled to account for it by postulating a realm of super-entities which could explain such seeming peculiarities. Confronted with this tradition of revisionary accounts of the self, at least some contemporary theorists are now approaching the issue with a diagnostic eye, trying to identify the features that have led philosophers to embrace such positions, with the aim of offering a better understanding of them that could “give philosophy peace”. That is to say, that could make them compatible with the commonsensical view that selves are identical to living human beings and that “I”, either in speech or in thought, is a genuinely referential expression. So, for instance, Christopher Peacocke opens his influential and thought provoking “Self-knowledge and illusions of transcendence”1 with the following remarks. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy is one of the leading contemporary thinkers in France today. Through an inventive reappropriation of the major figures in the continental tradition, Nancy has developed an original ontology that impacts the way we think about religion, politics, community, embodiment, and art. Drawing from a wide range of his writing, Marie-Eve Morin provides the first comprehensive and systematic account of Nancy’s thinking, all the way up to his most recent work on the deconstruction of Christianity. Without losing sight of (...) the heterogeneity of Nancy’s work, Morin presents a concise articulation of the organizing concepts, which structure Nancy’s body of work. The guiding thread is that of an essential rift at the heart of any “self” by which this self is exposed and relates to itself and other selves. Nancy’s ontology undercuts dichotomies between individual and community, interior and exterior, matter and spirit, thing and thought, not in the name of mere deconstruction, but in seeking to open a thinking of the “limit” or the “edge” as the locus of sense. While Nancy’s work has often been presented in relation to Heidegger or Derrida, Morin demonstrates the originality of Nancy’s work and argues that, despite the variety of its preoccupations and topics, it possesses its own rigorous internal logic. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy and related fields who seek a systematic and critical understanding of one of the most original contemporary thinkers. (shrink)

While many aspects of human life are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, values related to selfhood and community are among the most challenging to preserve. In what follows, I focus on the importance of values and valuing in climate change adaptation. To do so, I will first discuss two alternate approaches to valuing, both of which fail to recognise the loss of valued objects and practices that both of which help to generate a sense of self and deserve (...) to be respected and mourned. Ultimately, I argue that an approach to valuing that is responsive to change and open to loss will enable humans to be more resilient in the face of anthropogenic climate change, in order that we may move forward and construct selves that fit the context in which we live. (shrink)

Interference is paternalistic when it restricts an individual’s freedom for their own good. Anti-paternalists, such as John Stuart Mill, object to this for various reasons, including that the individual is usually a better judge of her own interests than the would-be paternalist. However, Wilkinson argues that a Parfitian reductivist approach to personal identity opens the door to what he calls ‘identity-relative paternalism’ where someone’s present action is restricted for the sake of a different future self.1 This is an interesting argument, (...) but it is not clear whether it involves permissible paternalism. At the risk of stating the obvious, permissible paternalism must be both permissible and paternalistic. Wilkinson’s identity-relative paternalism could be either, but not obviously both. If the present and future selves are different individuals, then interference is potentially permissible but no longer paternalistic. Alternatively, they are identical, in which case the interference is genuine paternalism, but cannot be justified by appeal to their distinctness. Wilkinson may escape this dilemma by invoking Parfit, who challenges the common notion that identity is all or nothing.2 According to Parfit’s revisionary view, the present and future self may share some connections but not others. However, once we have identified these similarities and differences, there is no further question whether or not they …. (shrink)

How to Pool Risks across Generations makes the case for the collective provision of pensions, on fair terms of social cooperation. Through the insurance of a mutual association which extends across society and over multiple generations, we share one another's fates by pooling risks across both space and time. Resources are transferred, not simply between different people, but also within the possible future lives of each person: from one's more fortunate to one's less fortunate future selves. The book opens (...) with an investigation of the longevity and investment risk that even a single individual on a desert island would face in providing for her old age. From this atomistic starting point, it builds up, within and across the chapters, to increasingly collective forms of pension provision. By joining together, it is possible to tame the risks we would face as individuals each with our own private pension pot. A collective pension can be justified as a 'social union of social unions': an enduring corporate body, which is formed by agreements to pool risks, in a manner that involves reciprocity between the various individuals that constitute the collective. Even though all individuals age and die, a collective pension scheme remains evergreen, as the average age of members remains relatively unchanged, through the influx of new members to replace those who retire. It is therefore possible to smooth risks indefinitely across as well as within generations, to the mutual advantage of each. (shrink)

In the opening chapter of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke explains that the self-understanding or self-measure of the human mind includes an account of the mind’s limits, and so the mind’s self-understanding can provide adequate grounds for intellectual self-moderation or self-control: “If we can find out, how far the Understanding can extend its view; how far it has Faculties to attain Certainty; and in what Cases it can only judge and guess, we may learn to content our (...) class='Hi'>selves with what is attainable by us in this State.” Furthermore: “If we can find out those Measures, whereby a rational Creature put in that State, which Man is in, in this World, may, and ought to govern his Opinions, and Actions depending thereon, we need not be troubled, that some other things escape our Knowledge.” Compared to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre may appear to exemplify the very opposite of intellectual modesty and self-control. Unlike Locke, Fichte argues that a true system of knowledge should not seek to limit or moderate itself by reference to what is allegedly unknowable outside of it. A true system of knowledge, writes Fichte, “. . . only has to agree with itself. It can be explained only by itself, and it can be proven - or refuted - only on its own terms.” Furthermore, Fichte suggests that an appreciation of his system of knowledge requires not modesty in his readers, but rather an implicit sense of superiority: “I wish to have nothing to do with those who, as a result of protracted spiritual servitude, have lost their own selves and, along with this loss of themselves, have lost any feeling for their own conviction . . .” In this essay, I shall seek to show that, contrary to initial impressions, it is Fichtean idealism, and not Lockean (or any similar) realism, that is truly modest. According to my account, Locke’s explicit declarations concerning the modesty and limitedness of his own project exhibit a certain ignorance concerning the genuine problems at issue. In his claim to be modest, the realist Locke professes to know more than he actually does, and thus manifests his own immodesty. By contrast, the idealist Fichte must refrain from such direct claims to modesty and must appear to be immodest, precisely because he has a greater understanding of how radically limited human knowledge always is. Like Plato’s Charmides, Fichte realizes that any explicit claim to self-limitation and self-moderation would actually give lie to itself. (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

In the Anglo-American cultural sphere, the growing awareness of global warming and ecocide has coincided with the proliferation of a much discussed, post-apocalyptic imaginary that transports us to uninhabitable planetary futures. These “fictions,” as E. Ann Kaplan notes in a discussion of their mobilising potential, act as “memories for the future” which make us “identify with future selves struggling to survive.” This article turns to Günther Anders’s notion of “apocalypse-blindness” (1956) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to set out an (...) alternative way of understanding the powerfully sentimental force such images of doom convey. While seemingly turning our gaze to the future and onto the devastating impact of consumerist lifestyles, I argue that this doom-ridden imaginary also entails a sentimentalisation of our own “inability to feel” and be sufficiently affected by the reality we know ourselves to be contributing to. As such, it bears witness to the trauma of “not being able to adequately feel” what one already knows. By revisiting The Road, a text that occupies a central role in discussions of the potentials and cathartic pitfalls of post-apocalyptic fiction, I suggest that its political potential lies in this confrontation with the limits of feeling. And the politics it opens onto does not hinge on images on ruin, but on a yearning for a socially sanctioned right to feel and express the fear representations only seem able to convey in an inadequate, anaesthetic manner. (shrink)

Pictures are principally descriptive. Advertising images highlight features of potential purchases; cartoons open portals to scenes in fictional worlds; snapshots in the family photo album remind us of our past selves and landmark events in our personal histories; works of pictorial art express thoughts or feelings about depicted scenes. In addition, pictures serve a directive or action-guiding function that, though not taken into account by theorists, deserves no less attention than their descriptive one. Theories of depiction and the (...) appreciation of pictures stand to benefit by taking "directive pictures" into account, as do theories of representation in general and mental representation in particular. (shrink)

Techno-Anthropology recognizes the intertwining of technology with aims, needs, practices, and skills; ‘the techno’ and ‘the anthro’ are not only interconnected, but historically co-constituted. In this paper developments in ‘personal analytics’ are examined with the aim of proposing epistemological and methodological directions for Techno-Anthropological exploration. Personal analytics refers to the field of interactions that surrounds tracking various bodily and mental functions, including the analysis, visualization, and distribution of the data, thereby encompassing people’s involvements with measuring devices and data movements. By (...) discussing findings from a self-tracking study that focused on heart-rate variability measurement, the article opens for scrutiny ways in which personal data can translate people’s selves into a format that is engaging and actionable. This, in turn, enables researchers to witness and critically assess a terrain where bodily and mental capacities, and life itself, are not taken as given, but become part of the processes of everyday sense-making and contestation. (shrink)

Traditionally, two clinical models have been dominant in psychoanalysis: the classical paradigm, which views the analyst as an objective mirror, and the participant-observation paradigm, which views the analyst as an intersubjective participant-observer. According to John Fiscalini, an evolutionary shift in psychoanalytic consciousness has been taking place, giving rise to coparticipant inquiry, a third paradigm that represents a dramatic shift in analytic clinical theory and that has profound clinical implications. Coparticipant inquiry integrates the individualistic focus of the classical tradition and the (...) social focus of the participant-observer perspective. It is marked by a radical emphasis on analysts' and patients' analytic equality, emotional reciprocity, psychic symmetry, and relational mutuality. Unlike the previous two paradigms, coparticipant inquiry suggests that we are all inherently communal beings and, yet, are simultaneously innately self-fulfilling, unique individuals. The book looks closely at the therapeutic dialectics of the personal and interpersonal selves and discusses narcissism -- the perversion of the self -- within its clinical role as the neurosis that contextualizes all other neuroses. Thus the goal of this book is to define coparticipant inquiry; articulate its major principles; analyze its implications for a theory of the self and the treatment of narcissism; and discuss the therapeutic potential of the coparticipant field and the coparticipant nature of transference, resistance, therapeutic action, and analytic vitality. Fiscalini explores "analytic space," which marks the psychic limit of coparticipant activity; the "living through process," which, he suggests, subtends all analytic change; and "openness to singularity," which is essential to analytic vitality. _Coparticipant Psychoanalysis_ brings crucial insights to clinical theory and practice and is an invaluable resource for psychoanalysts and therapists, as well as students and practitioners of psychology, psychiatry, and social work. (shrink)

The "art of being free" is an essential part of democracy. It involves, Mark Reinhardt believes, bringing into being the multiple spaces in and practices through which individuals and groups help to constitute their lives, their selves, their worlds. Americans are presently witnessing a contraction of officially sanctioned spaces for citizen action. It is now crucial, Reinhardt argues, to identify ways of opening new spaces for the direct practice of democratic politics. Reinhardt treats the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, (...) Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt as exemplary sources for an expansion of political possibility. These writers indicate where and how the new spaces can be brought into being, and they reveal acts of making space as some of the prime moments of politics. Reinhardt's extended readings of these writers, never previously treated together, are quite unlike the familiar understandings of their thought. "Taking liberties," he brings the literary and political sensibility usually associated with postmodernism to a sympathetic if critical encounter with eminently modern thinkers. The result is a strong and idiosyncratic book, accessible and stylish, that mixes acute readings of canonical thinkers with more practical applications and illustrations. Reinhardt combines attention to textual detail and nuance with concern for contemporary politics, discussing as an unusually inventive example the AIDS activist group ACT UP. (shrink)

Adam Sedgwick's complaint that Darwin's rejection of final causes indicated a "demoralized understanding" cannot easily be dismissed: if nothing happens because it should, our opinions about what is morally beautiful are no more than projections. Darwin was carrying out an Enlightenment project — to exclude final causes or God's purposes from science because we could not expect to know what they were. That abandonment of final causes was an episode in religious history, a reaction against complacent idolatry, an attempt to (...) purify the soul. By not moralizing the universe we were to be released to see the beauty in all its parts, and in the whole, and so to acknowledge our own selves as fragments or facets of a cosmos whose value transcends our petty purposes. Unfortunately, later thinkers, forgetful of the priority of value (both in human life and in the universe at large), supposed that merely material causes could and (weirdly) should explain away the very recognition of value which drives us and the world. If Darwin had been right — if we value what we do solely because our ancestors somehow outbred their cousins — there could be no authority in science, nor any real distinction between savages and sages (except, no doubt, that savages have more descendants). If he is wrong, then the way is open to consider that archetypes and values, as partial realizations of the single, simple, transcendent One, have had an effect on Nature as well as on our attitudes. The 'moral', so to speak, is always breaking in on the 'material', and always losing its way, to be renewed again. The real explanation of the world's existence, and of life's, is that God wills it so. This does not enable us to predict what else He wills, any more than Darwinian theory itself can actually predict in anything but the broadest, emptiest of terms. Without an appeal to that, broadly Platonic, picture there can be no genuine explanation of the world's variety, nor any duty to seek one. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.1 (2003) 22-38 [Access article in PDF] Descartes's Rhetoric:Roads, Foundations, and Difficulties in the Method Jeanette Bicknell Descartes's Discours de la méthode is an extremely rich text for anyone interested in the rhetorical and literary aspects of philosophical works, as well as for those interested in the history of scientific discourse. 1 Commentators have tended to stress the inclusive and possibly emancipatory aspects of the text: (...) Descartes's use of the vernacular and inclusion of autobiographical elements. 2 Without denying the democratic potential of the Discours, I will argue that close attention to its rhetorical and literary features reveals an unacknowledged tension in Descartes's thought between the individual and the social or communal aspects of method. This tension seems to have been overlooked by commentators.Briefly, the tension I have identified is manifest in the conflicting metaphors Descartes uses to characterize scientific and epistemological progress. The best known and most studied of these metaphors are from architecture and town-planning. Less attention has been paid to the metaphor of the road or path (chemin) in the Discours. Descartes sees cognitive and scientific progress as ultimately the work of a solitary individual. We can call this the "heroic" or "great individual" view of scientific progress. This is clear in his architectural metaphors. Yet recurrent metaphors characterizing cognitive progress as a road point to a more social or communal view of science as the work of many hands (or feet). Roads are social entities par excellence. They pre-exist those who travel them and are available to all who want to travel them. Although roads may be planned and built according to specifications, they may arise simply from the aggregated actions of individuals. I suggest that this tension between two fundamentally different characterizations and conceptions of cognitive progress indicates a deep division in Descartes's thought, unresolved in the Discours.What is at issue, philosophically, in my analysis of Descartes's rhetoric? First and most generally is the problem of bringing together all the [End Page 22] elements of a philosophical text, especially a text with the seminal importance of the Discours. What status and significance should we give to those elements of a text that do not seem to be directly part of the arguments? These elements include the author's self-presentation and indications as to the implied audience, as well as figurative language and illustrative and explicatory metaphors. I shall show how these elements repay close attention, and that it is fruitful to test them for consistency with the text's explicit claims and arguments.More specifically, my interpretation has implications for Descartes's program. Descartes's work is generally taken to be the basis of strict traditional autonomism and reductionist individualism. One critique of such individualism is that methods, not to mention the languages in which they are expressed, are social rather than private. A close examination of Descartes's own language supports this critique, as his rhetoric can be seen to undercut his avowed position in the text. It is open to debate whether or not Descartes was aware of the tension between his autonomism and individualism on one hand, and his hopes for cognitive and scientific progress founded upon method on the other. Thus, it is entirely possible that the quintessentially modern philosopher of the self had excessive expectations of that self, not to mention an incoherent picture of it.Finally, the implications of my analysis reach beyond Descartes's text to broader conceptual issues. The tension I have identified in the Discours is not limited to Descartes's work, but it points to underlying difficulties in trying to think through the problems he discusses. While methods are social, an individualistic element may be ineliminable. But the social is not just the aggregation of asocial selves. The self, its education and development, and its ability to participate in a method, must all be social. Another issue is the nature of scientific and epistemological progress, and the relationship between their individual and more communal aspects. And whatever their relationship, we... (shrink)

This article isolates ten prepositions, which constitute the undercurrent paradigm of contemporary discourse of health disease and medicine. Discussion of the interrelationship between those prepositions leads to a systematic refutation of this paradigm. An alternative set is being forwarded. The key notions of the existing paradigm are that health is the natural condition of humankind and that disease is a deviance from that nature. Natural things are harmonious and healthy while human made artifacts are coercive interference with natural balance. It (...) is suggested that the current paradigm is influenced by the world of finances and by instrumental reason. The alternative model suggests that human nature cannot be delineated. Humans fashion their own selves and nature by artificial means, medicine among them. The article discusses the implications of the paradigm adapted in various scholarly and popular debates such as the use of sex hormones for contraception, the care of the elderly, holistic medicine and distributive justice in health care. Medicine is not an isolated or a privileged realm. There is no unique entitlement to health care. It is always part of a broader agenda of social values and institutions. A open view of human societies, values and practices as they are situated within concrete material conditions is the platform required for an integrative and creative discourse of health care. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to obtain an increased understanding of the experiences of elderly people in geriatric care, with special reference to integrity. Data were collected through qualitative interviews with elderly people and, in order to obtain a description of caregivers’ integrity-promoting or non-promoting behaviours, participant observations and qualitative interviews with nursing students were undertaken. Earlier studies on the integrity of elderly people mainly concentrated on their personal and territorial space, so Kihlgren and Thorsén opened up the possibility (...) of considering the concept of integrity from a broader view by recognizing its relationship to the larger framework of the self-concept. Based on this, findings in the present study indicate that elderly people’s integrity relating to their corporal self were the least violated. On the other hand, their psycological, information and cultural selves were the most exposed. The study also identified a further dimension (i.e. one relating to social self), which should be included in the concept of integrity because respecting elderly people’s social self reduces their feelings of loneliness, isolation and seclusion. In summary, the results indicate that the concept of integrity is complex and has several dimensions. (shrink)

Humans are a species endowed with considerable cognitive plasticity, existing in a malleable social environment. As a result, behavioural constraints emerge, which ensure the smooth functioning of the whole. In order to enable the negotiation of social contracts, individuals are under pressure to adopt consistent behavioural track-records that instil trust in potential interaction partners. This leads to the emergence of stable selves. The pressure towards consistency facilitates the proliferation of normative relations. The arrival of language intensifies this consistency-enhancing pressure (...) on the individual, as it opens up the cognitive domain as an additional target of pressurization. (shrink)

There are some recurring symbols in the literature of Jorge Luis Borges, and once those symbols are understood, authors are admitted into the labyrinthine terrain of Borges’s mind and writing. The symbols are the labyrinth, the book, the mirror, the tiger, the courage of irony, words that are music, and the friend. The first four symbols are tools that the author uses to confuse the reader (the labyrinth), a curiosity that can never be satisfied (the book), the awareness of multiple (...) selves (the mirror), and the anticipation of death (the tiger). The other three symbols provide a certain palliative for the melancholic pessimism inspired by the first four symbols. The courage of irony and words that are music give room for a certain individual joy inside the Borgesian universe. Finally, for those who long to escape from isolation, the friend depicts a possible metaphysical opening to intimacy with other human beings. (shrink)

"What one cannot compute, one must poetize." So concludes this remarkable sequence of propositions on the centrality of poetry for what we call cognition. Developed through brief, lucid, and eloquent logical elaborations that are punctuated by incisive readings of a range of poems--Western and non-Western, low culture and high--Poetry and Mind offers to theorists and practitioners of literature, together with logicians and cognitive scientists, a more sophisticated account of the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience. Poetry grants us the ability (...) to move "beyond the limits of thought" and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein's point of arrival in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary, philosophical, and scientific traditions. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience cannot be ignored if, as humanists, we are interested in the way we think. Dubreuil thus calls for a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition to better situate the normal regimes of thought, as well as to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. Poetry and Mind shows that poetry--a widespread and perhaps universal phenomenon among humans--arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations, but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, and singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. Made of iterations and linguistic reorganizations, they exceed their own algorithms and, often, they become reflexive, strange, and cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than "global": it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, and from cuneiform tablet to rap music. Together, Dubreuil's readings and elaborations offer a major reappraisal of the relations between creation, language and our embodied brains."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This book addresses the topic of the explicit and implicit commitments about persons as a kind in the literature on personal identity and draws out their political implications. I claim that the political implications of a metaphysical account can serve as a test on its veracity in cases in which the object-kind under analysis is itself constitutively normative, as the kind person might be, or in those cases in which counting as a member of the kind in question confers a (...) certain normative status upon those that do so count, which the kind person certainly satisfies. I argue that metaphysical accounts of personal identity often contain certain mistaken background assumptions concerning personhood, often due to a failure to recognize that being a person is environmentally dependent. -/- Because being a person is environmentally dependent, but this is not often noted, let alone incorporated into our theories of persons, although there are exceptions, a closer look at those theories is required if we are to have a just society. In fact, it is a bit surprising that this is the current situation, since the claim that certain members of society are oppressed due to being denied full personhood and its attendant rights has been the basis of several social movements: first-wave feminism, anti-slavery movements, and civil rights movements generally. Historically, these resistance movements aimed at claiming that, unlike how they were treated, they did in fact meet the requirements for personhood that those in more privileged sectors did and should therefore enjoy the same rights as the more privileged. -/- While I agree with the justification for these movements -- that the injustice driving them is that of the denial of the rights of persons -- I advocate for moving away from the idea that the only appropriate response is to count those who make such claims as being members that meet the dominant conception of personhood. Instead, I want to highlight the fact that if being a person is an environmentally dependent fact, theories of the nature of persons must recognize this or risk reflecting and perpetuating the current status quo. -/- For these reasons, those in need of recognition of their rights as persons should not only resist the failure of having them granted but should also question the current understanding of the concept itself, since the very notion may be riddled with normative assumptions typical only of those with certain kinds of privilege. That is, fighting for recognition as persons, without also resisting and questioning the source and objectivity of our current concept of personhood, risks failing to truly challenge the currently unfair social structure in any deep way. -/- There is a risk, however, with taking such a stance -- that it will be fallaciously inferred that there is no fair concept of persons at all to which are owed rights. But this does not follow from the stance I take. All that follows is that we must recognize our fallibility in offering metaphysical theories, particularly when the concept under investigation is normatively sensitive and environmentally dependent in the way that the kind person seems to be. -/- Theories concerning the metaphysics of persons, then, must address the fact that those with privilege not only have more power to assert their rights as persons, but they are also the source of most received views of the concept itself. It is possible, therefore, that our current metaphysical theories may be mis-describing the objective nature of personhood as a kind for politically biased reasons. -/- I argue that one of the particularly pernicious assumptions frequently made is that to be a person is to be a certain kind of psychologically integrated being. This is an ideal we seem to hold dear, since we tend to pathologize the failure to achieve it. I claim, however, that this thesis about persons as integrated is exactly the kind of idea that fails the environmental dependence test, since this state of integration is often only readily had by those who have a certain amount of control over their external environment, which many of us do not enjoy. For those who are not members of the dominant group, a strongly integrated self is sometimes simply not on the horizon, since being subject to the vicissitudes of the external environment often leads to conflict, fragmentation, or disintegration. Having inadequate power over one's own circumstances tends to produce what we might call “fractured selves,” selves that face a multitude of environmental forces, many times thrusting contradictory norms, roles, and traits, upon those subjected to them. -/- The fact that the failure to achieve integration is in fact pathologized makes the integration thesis seriously questionable, since it creates a situation in which those most in need of being conferred the normative status of being a person will fail to get such recognition, and in fact, possibly labelled as "defective" in some way or other. This is unjust for many reasons, at least one of which is that it relies on morally irrelevant facts to determine a person's normative status. -/- The previous issues raise the question of whether the aim of a giving a metaphysical account of persons ought to be understood descriptively or prescriptively, since current metaphysical accounts would fail to count many individuals as persons. However, taking metaphysical accounts as a prescriptive is highly controversial. I doubt that most of those offering explicit metaphysical theories of persons would agree that they are engaged in any kind of prescriptive project. Some psychologists and psychiatrists perhaps may take themselves to be determining whether a person is "healthy" by our current understanding of what it is to be a person, but the idea of having a healthy psychology sufficient for being a fully competent person is vastly different from having a healthy physical body, which does seem to have a more objective basis, although even this is questioned in disability studies. -/- The strong integration thesis, then, as now applied, clearly raises political issues, and has potential negative consequences for many beings that we typically do think of as persons. The integration thesis then needs to be replaced with a more adequately descriptive metaphysical theory or revised in a way so that it avoids these negative political consequences. -/- I see two paths open: (1) maintain the integration thesis as an ideal, and grant those who fail to meet it a temporary kind of normative status equal to that of being a person and push for substantive equal opportunity to achieve integration; or (2) reject the ideal altogether and offer a different account of the nature of being a person that counts so-called "fractured selves" as persons. -/- I believe that path (2) is preferable to path (1) for several reasons. First, it requires no condescension or paternalistic attitudes towards those who fail to be fully integrated; second, it expresses intellectual humility in accepting that standards that appear objective are often, in reality, biased and should not be universally applied; and third, it is more realistic in that it does not assume that there is an infinite amount of resources, and therefore harbors no illusions that equalizing power structures will allow everyone to enjoy the same amount and kind of power currently held by the dominant classes. -/- My own metaphysical account of what matters for survival to persons over time advocates for the idea that persons ought to be understood as constituted not only by internal psychological relations, but also by their relations to their surrounding environments, and this includes relations to inanimate objects. This view, I argue, can accommodate fractured selves as full persons, allowing for various psychological configurations to count as persons. It is also an improvement on views that do happen to recognize the environmental influence on persons -- social constitution views. The reason is that these views argue that persons just are what their environmental social surroundings dictate, which also has potentially negative political consequences, since it threatens to bind persons so closely to socio-cultural contexts that it closes off the possibility of resistance to them. However, because the view I endorse, makes persons environmentally dependent not only on their socio-cultural context, but on the whole of their environment, this makes persons partly independent of socio-cultural contexts, allowing them room to question them, which as noted, I believe they should be. (shrink)

A primary intention of our original manuscript was to provide examples of both harmful and helpful influences of one cultural artifact—depression memoirs—on who female readers take their selves to be, and who they may actually end up being. Bradley Lewis beautifully articulated our strategy as “chart[ing] out … conflicting vectors” : that is, delineating select examples of how certain outer narratives conveyed in depression memoirs may kindle sexist and sanist modes of being. Our hope was that making these vectors (...) explicit could ultimately be liberating for some individuals by “opening up... (shrink)

Abstract:What if our politics are shaped by the texture of wounds rather than the identity of selves? What possible future will have been opened up by posing that very question? I take up Eve Sedgwick’s invitation to begin with stigma “as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy” for a transformative queer politics and elaborate Sedgwick’s attention to spoiled identity through Hortense Spiller’s conceptualization of the flesh. The flesh substantiates the grounds for a materialist ontology that begins with stigma, the (...) materiality of the wound, to constitute a transformative politics toward a fugitive elsewhere. Reading Sedgwick and Spillers together opens up a transformative ontological register that spans the material, affective, and fugitive. I argue that the hieroglyphics of the flesh give us knowledge of ourselves and others and the world(s) we have lived through but also invite us to transform who and what we are, how we relate, and what a world might look like where our being is not constituted by fugitive survival. I suggest that such hieroglyphics can be engaged by touching wounds understood as a haptic reading of textures impressed on our embodied being while paying attention to the lines of flight that erupt from the wound. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:382 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the spiritual effort of all mankind. Many so-called historic events, he was convinced, will in the end be "as written in water," but the work of the human "spirit," however limited at any given time, is accumulative and helps prepare a better future. It seems fitting to close this review with the concluding words of high commendation addressed to him by the Argentinian Society of (...) Writers on the occasion of the appearance of the Theory of Man: "Se premia a un hombre, a una obra, a una conducta." (We are paying homage to a man, a work, a noble conduct.) COR~ELI~:S KRUS~ Wesleyan University The Knowledge o] Man. Selected Essays. By Martin Buber. Edited with an Introduction by Maurice Friedman. Translated by Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, TB 135H. Pp. 186. $1.45.) The present volume contains the English translations, previously published, of six anthropological essays of Martin Buber, which had appeared originally in German. They are: Distance and Relation (1950), Elements of the Interhuman (1954), What is Common to All (1956), The Word that is Spoken (1960), Guilt and Guilt Feelings (1957), Man and his Image-Work (1955). As an Appendix has been added the unpublished text of a discussion between the late Martin Buber and the psychologist Carl R. Rogers, in April 1957. An introductory Essay by Maurice S. Friedman intends to set these essays in the context of Buber's philosophy of dialogue and "to show their interrelations and their significance for other fields of thought" (p. 7). Both the Introductory Essay and the translated texts had been seen by Buber before going to the press. Broadly speaking, these essays concern the distinctive features of man, and the reality of the dazwischen (p. 12), translated as "there in-between," "the between" or "betweenness" (p. 107): between man and reality (art), and between man and man (the interhuman in dialogue, word and language, guilt and psychotherapy). No specific texts on religion and knowledge have been included in this collection, its purpose being to present Buber's "philosophical anthropology" (p. 7). One may speak of a synthesis of Buber's view of man, as it comes out in this volume. Man is constituting "a special category of being" (60), by being capable of entering into living relations; this happens in the sphere of "the between," in particular the interhuman, the unfolding of which is "the dialogicaI" (p. 75). Here the "spokenness" of the word has its place (p. 112), here are found the different forms of encounter from which the human "selves" emerge after "a bold swinging...into the life of the other" (p. 81) and making each other "present" through "imagining" the real in each other (p. 70). There is the permanent "temptation to... take refuge in the pseudo security of the world of It, the world of ordered objectivity and private subjectivity" (Friedman, p. 23). But there is also the "common world" (cosmos) as built by "common speech-with-meaning" (logos) (Friedman, p. 40); this is the world of the We (pp. 107-108). Buber dismisses the annihilation of the human person in the dream and sleep of the East (pp. 91-96), the "situationless" and "uncommunal" chemical holidays of Aldous Huxley (p. 100), the solipsism and panpsychism of C. G. Jung (p. 124-125) : by all of these "the pure duty and responsibility of waking togetherness" (p. 91) has been forsaken. Of particular interest are Friedman's pages concerning Buber's view of the unconscious (pp. 32-38): they replace an essay which Buber had intended to write on the subject. In this connection the essay on existential guilt to oneself and to others is illuminating ; this guilt is "as something of an ontic character" (p. 123), and only a--"for the man of our age" (p. 138)--difficult self-illumination can hereby give insight and open the door into "the identity of the human person as such with himself" (p. 147). Also, the discussion on psychotherapy should be mentioned, where Buber puts his finger on "this dialogue bounded by tragedy" (p. 174) in which "You are not equals and cannot... (shrink)

Today, a new vein of queer Marxist-feminist family-abolitionist theorising is reviving contemporary feminists’ willingness to imagine, politically, what women's liberationists in the 1970s called ‘mothering against motherhood’. Concurrently, the jokey portmanteau ‘momrade’, i.e. mom + comrade, has circulated persistently in the twenty-first century on online forums maintained by communities of mothers and/or leftists. This article asks: what if, in the name of abolishing the family, we took the joke entirely seriously? What makes a ‘mom’ a ‘momrade’, or vice versa? In (...) what ways does the work of reproduction, conceivably, actively participate in class struggles, producing new worlds (and un-producing others)? How do the collective arts of mothering unmake selves? And how does the verb ‘to mother’ work to abolish the present state of things? The chosen point of departure for exploring these questions is the concept of xenohospitality; a term I borrow from Helen Hester – one of the authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto – who defines it as openness to the alien, a definition I link closely to ‘comradeliness’. Further, the meaning of the term ‘family abolition’, here, is aptly summed up by the formula ‘xenofam ≥ biofam’; to abolish the family is not to destroy relationships of care and nurturance, but on the contrary, to expand and proliferate them. Reflecting on the conditions of possibility for such universally xenofamilial – that is to say, comradely – kin relations, this article implicitly argues for utopia(nism) in feminist kinship studies. It grounds this utopianism, however, in first-hand experiences of informal ‘death doula’ labour. The labour of mothering one's mother is offered as a potential practice of un-mothering oneself and others. In fact, the argument pivots on these auto-ethnographic observations about maternal bereavement, because the event of the author's mother's death interrupted and intruded upon the feminist theorising involved. (shrink)

This paper argues that Karoline von Günderrode’s unique account of the socially constructed self provides a model for satisfying relationships and a stable self on the basis of a fragmented and untransparent subjectivity. Günderrode views experience as a discontinuous series of moments out of which a self can be constructed in two ways, both involving interactions with others. One of these is narrative; the other is a form of immediate experience, including experiencing together with others, that precedes narrative accounts of (...) identity. For Günderrode, the most important ways of interacting with others involve sharing thoughts, feelings and experiences without attempting to integrate these into a more holistic image of, or story about, the person with whom one is interacting. The result is a model for relationships between transitory, opaque selves that creates a basis for social interaction and the construction of identity that can survive and flourish without a stable self that is completely known to itself and others. -/- This journal is open access and includes so many wonderful articles. (shrink)

This article asks how people come to interpret themselves and others as autonomous given their multiple dependencies. We draw on a cross-case comparison of ethnographic studies with two populations for whom autonomy is both central and problematic: elderly patients in post-acute care, and young adults with disabilities in an independent living program. Analyzing the institutional efforts to make their clients “as independent as possible,” we find that staff members at each organization formulate autonomy as a temporal project through an ongoing (...) calibration of open futures, ideal pasts, and situational competence. Constantly adjusting and fine-tuning where in time autonomy “really” is, workers arrange present dependence so that the contours of the future remain open for their clients. In other words, they make use of temporal markers to produce recognizable autonomous subjects whose dependencies are momentary. Theorizing this temporal project enables us to see more clearly how all of us engage in the constant business of “doing” autonomy, and to better understand the role of institutions in producing autonomous selves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“An Equivocal Couple Overwhelmed by Life”A Phenomenological Analysis of PregnancySara HeinämaaTwo conceptions of human generativity prevail in contemporary feminist philosophy. First, several contributors argue that the experience of pregnancy, when analyzed by phenomenological tools, undermines several distinctions that are central to Western philosophy, most importantly the subject-object distinction and the self-other and own-alien distinctions. This line of argument was already outlined by Iris Marion Young in her influential essay (...) “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” (1984). The other dominant argument is related to the first one, and it states that organic birth is the event that establishes the first experiential separation between the self and the other. On this understanding, the mother-fetus relation would not involve any relations between two corporeal selves; all such relations would be postnatal. This notion has been defended, for example, by Christine Schües (1997; 2000) and Johanna Oksala (2003).1On the other hand, classical phenomenology is dominated by the idea that the rigorous first-person methodology that is essential to phenomenology dictates that the sense of birth must be studied primarily by reflection on the structures of our own recollection or memory. Consequently, the primary sense of human birth would be that of an unattainable limit. This is argued on the basis of the existential fact that we all are born but cannot recall our own birth, or else on the basis of the transcendental fact that the structure [End Page 31] of retention ties each living present to an earlier one and implies that the transcendental ego cannot be subject to generation.2 From this perspective, all analyses and reflections of the experiences of labor, gestation, and pregnancy would be secondary since the sense of birth that these experiences involve is the nativity of another human being and not the nativity of the reflecting self.This paper challenges both the feminist and the classical phenomenological approach. I maintain that careful phenomenological analyses of the experience of pregnancy undermine both notions. Such analyses show, on the one hand, that pregnancy does not imply a nondistinction or self-other fusion but on the contrary involves a specific self-other divide. At the same time, they demonstrate that the sense of birth is more complex than the classical recollection-paradigm suggests and that it includes more components than the signification of an unattainable limit. A proper phenomenology of birth must take into account not only the universal fact that we all are born, but also the equally universal fact that each of us is born from another human being, that is, some other human subject.3 This other human being who “gave” us birth or “from whose flesh we were born” provides us with a unique perspective on our own past, beyond the limits of our own recollection. Her perspective is incomparable to any other external perspective; rather than simply giving us an additional third-person viewpoint on our own organic birth, this one person is able to open a second-person perspective on our pre- and postnatal life and the transition between them—all of which is beyond our own recollection.My argument proceeds by the following steps:First, I develop a fresh discourse on the experience of pregnancy, by studying a set of remarks to be found in Julia Kristeva’s postphenomenological discourse on maternity, on the one hand, and in Simone de Beauvoir’s existential-phenomenological discourse on feminine embodiment, on the other hand. I use these remarks as leading clues for a novel phenomenological study of the experience of pregnancy.4 Contra Young’s influential account mentioned above, I argue that gestation, as experienced by women who live it in the first person, includes a separation between two sensory-motor beings in a nesting relation: the pregnant self and the embryonic other. The alternative account that I provide hinges on my analysis of the experience of fetal movements and the role of touch-sensations and kinesthetic sensations in such experiences. Ultimately, I argue that pregnancy does not erode the self-other boundary or the own-alien boundary but reestablishes both divisions.Second, I compare my account of the experience of pregnancy to Merleau... (shrink)

Through an ethnographic account of a social reform project led by Islamic activist women in the village of Mehmeit in rural Egypt, this article analyses women's Islamic activism as a form of worship. Women's experiences of activism are at the centre of this account, which highlights their attempts to economically and socially develop a destitute rural community. Their development ideals mirror the embedded principles of liberal secular modernity and offer a tangible example of the concomitance of these so-called binaries of (...) religion and secularism in women's religious activism. Normative assumptions regarding religion and secularism as two binary constructs have largely dictated a monolithic view of women who engage in Islamic activism as religious subjects primarily devoted to a spiritual, internal faith. Persistent models of religious selves engaged in a continuous exercise of self-fashioning towards a fixed ‘religious ideal’ overlook the complexity and seamlessness of the desires that animate these subjectivities. Moreover, it is inaccurate to represent participants in Islamic activism as homogenized into one overarching group that adheres to standardized religious membership criteria. Discourses of modernity have also constructed separate spheres of what is defined as religion and secularism. Yet, these spheres, in practice, are not always so neatly demarcated as they are in modern principles. Societies shaped by the historical and temporal dynamics of colonialism, modernization, secularization and nation building projects present more complex and heterogeneous forms of subjectivities in their members. This article illustrates how a theoretical concomitance of religion and secularism opens up new possible considerations of women's activism in Islamic movements. The author argues that the desires and subjectivities of Islamic women that inform their activism are ultimately linked to the historical emergence of secularism and state modernization schemes aimed at transforming Muslim subjects into modern citizens of liberal democracies. (shrink)