Pride, Virtue, and Self-Hood: A Reconstruction of Hume1

1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Chazan
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Moral Domain ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Way

Hume’s account of how the self enters the moral domain and comes to a consciousness of itself as a moral being is one which he superimposes upon his Treatise account of the constitution of the non-metaphysical self. This primordial self is for Hume constructed out of the passions of pride and humility which are themselves in tum constructed out of certain feelings of pain and pleasure, these feelings being worked on by memory and imagination, and converted back and forth into series of ideas and impressions. In presenting this account of the way in which we achieve a coherent self-awareness and self-knowledge such that we ‘know our own force’ (T 597), Hurne in fact employs a radical psychology which he must discard once the moral self comes into view. The use Hume makes of this psychology has gone unnoticed in the literature, but once we understand its implications we will be able to dispel the confusion that some have found in his story.

Mirror

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Figlerowicz
Keyword(s):  
Self Awareness ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Surrounding World ◽  
Natural Landscapes ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines a number of poems by John Ashbery. Ashbery’s poetry explores doubts about lyric expression’s dependence on its audience that are analogous to those voiced by Plath and Stevens. But like the novels discussed in earlier chapters, Ashbery’s lyrics also implicitly accept their speakers’ dependence, for their self-awareness, on audiences whose presence and attentiveness they cannot control. The mirror serves these speakers as a model for the intense, careful outward scrutiny that they constantly dream of but cannot consistently secure. As Ashbery’s speakers mistake for such mirrors paintings, daydreams, and natural landscapes, they reflect on the imperfect self-knowledge they can attain in a world from which such forms of outward support are not forthcoming—as well as on the way this desire for self-knowledge clouds their capacity to relate to their surrounding world. This notion of affect is further explored by juxtaposition against the views of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

“The Continuity of Married Companionship”

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-530
Author(s):  
Cara Weber
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Conception ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethical Action ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
A Site ◽  
Focus Questions

Victorian writers often focus questions of ethics through scenes of sympathetic encounters that have been conceptualized, both by Victorian thinkers and by their recent critics, as a theater of identification in which an onlooking spectator identifies with a sufferer. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) critiques this paradigm, revealing its negation of otherness and its corresponding fixation of the self as an identity, and offers an alternative conception of relationship that foregrounds the presence and distinctness of the other and the open-endedness of relationship. The novel develops its critique through an analysis of women's experience of courtship and marriage, insisting upon the appropriateness ofmarriage as a site for the investigation of contemporary ethical questions. In her depiction of Rosamond, Eliot explores the identity-based paradigm of the spectacle of others, and shows how its conception of selfhood leaves the other isolated, precluding relationship. Rosamond's trajectory in the novel enacts the identity paradigm's relation to skeptical anxieties about self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and reveals such anxieties to occur with particular insistence around images of femininity. By contrast, Dorothea's development in ethical self-awareness presents an alternative to Rosamond's participation in the identity paradigm. In Dorothea's experience the self emerges as a process, an ongoing practice of expression. The focus on expression in the sympathetic or conflictual encounter, rather than on identity, enables the overcoming of the identity paradigm's denial of otherness, and grounds a productive sympathy capable of informing ethical action.

scholarly journals Towards Self-Aware Multirotor Formations

Computers ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Kaiser ◽  
Veronika Lesch ◽  
Julian Rothe ◽  
Michael Strohmeier ◽  
Florian Spieß ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ◽  
Dynamic Behavior ◽  
The Self ◽  
General Category ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Aerial Vehicles ◽  
Air Space ◽  
Multiple Scenarios ◽  
Lead Vehicle ◽  
The Way

In the present day, unmanned aerial vehicles become seemingly more popular every year, but, without regulation of the increasing number of these vehicles, the air space could become chaotic and uncontrollable. In this work, a framework is proposed to combine self-aware computing with multirotor formations to address this problem. The self-awareness is envisioned to improve the dynamic behavior of multirotors. The formation scheme that is implemented is called platooning, which arranges vehicles in a string behind the lead vehicle and is proposed to bring order into chaotic air space. Since multirotors define a general category of unmanned aerial vehicles, the focus of this thesis are quadcopters, platforms with four rotors. A modification for the LRA-M self-awareness loop is proposed and named Platooning Awareness. The implemented framework is able to offer two flight modes that enable waypoint following and the self-awareness module to find a path through scenarios, where obstacles are present on the way, onto a goal position. The evaluation of this work shows that the proposed framework is able to use self-awareness to learn about its environment, avoid obstacles, and can successfully move a platoon of drones through multiple scenarios.

Plato's Critique of Hedonism in the Philebus

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT C. BARTLETT
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Human Good ◽  
Self Knowledge

No one can claim to have thought seriously about the question “How ought I to live?”, the guiding question of political philosophy, without having confronted the powerful answer to it supplied by hedonism. In thinking about hedonism today, we may begin from that thinker who was both very important to and early in its history: Plato. Of the dialogs that have come down to us as Plato's, only the Philebus takes as its direct aim the examination of pleasure's claim to be the human good. The Philebus culminates in the suggestions that the need for self-awareness or self-knowledge may finally be more fundamental to all human beings (and hence to hedonists) than is even the desire for pleasure, and that the experience of at least some pleasures constitutes a great obstacle to precisely the self-knowledge we seek. The Philebus is important today not only because it contains a searching analysis of hedonism but also because it compels us to raise the crucial question of the precise nature of “the good” with which we are justly most concerned—our own or that of others—a question whose centrality to self-knowledge we are in danger of forgetting.

The Rosamond Plots

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca N. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
The Status ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Radical Revision

Abstract In both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) an earnest and ambitious man falls in love with a superficial and beautiful woman named Rosamond. This essay explores the “Rosamond plots” to argue that Middlemarch stages a radical revision of the version of subjectivity vaunted in Jane Eyre. Via its invocation of Jane Eyre’s Rosamond plot, Middlemarch challenges the very nature of self-knowledge, questions the status of identification in intersubjective relationships, and insists upon the unknowability of the other. In Eliot’s retelling, the self-awareness promoted in Jane Eyre is not only insufficient, but also verges on self-absorption and even solipsism. One way in which Eliot enacts this revision is by shifting the focus of positive affective relationships away from models of identification. The change marks an evolution in our understanding of the way in which character and communal life is conceived by each author. More specifically, Eliot’s revisions situate empathic response as being dependent upon the recognition of the radical alterity of the other.

scholarly journals Rozwój duchowy z perspektywy zagadnienia świadomości. Zarys problematyki

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Adam Wysocki
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Stable State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Conceptual Explanation ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Proper Subject

The article focuses on the issue of spiritual development from the perspective of consciousness. The question of spiritual development exists in close connection with the concept of spirituality. The issue of consciousness can be reduced to three elements that make up a single act of consciousness: an empirical subject, complementing the object, and a non-act self-awareness, i.e. a non-empirical or proper subject. Self-awareness plays a key role in spiritual development in the fi eld of consciousness. The development of self-awareness should strive to reveal non-act self-awareness, but it has a similar structure and is experienced like any other acts of awareness. Spiritual development is the process of the of self-awareness growth and the constitution of the “Self” as an empirical subject that separates itself from a specifi c class of objects that are a component of the fi eld of possible experience for a person. The eff ects of spiritual development can also be described as self-knowledge, which can be a conceptual explanation of either actual experiences or a more stable state of the human subject.

Where We Stand

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-53
Author(s):  
Karen Stohr
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Reflection ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
Realistic Picture ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Way

This chapter considers the obstacles that stand in the way of moral improvement, particularly the challenges that human beings face in trying to acquire self-knowledge. It aims to set out a psychologically realistic picture of how human beings think about themselves and their actions, and what that means for moral improvement. It focuses on our epistemic limitations and how those interfere with our capacities for accurate self-perception and reflection. Those epistemic limitations are significant and any account of moral improvement must take them seriously. The chapter claims that moral improvement projects can still can get off the ground, even if we assume that moral reflection is standardly haphazard, unsystematic, and prone to error. Moral improvement is described as an effort to pull a coherent moral self together from threads of existing, messy, and conflicting practical identities and standpoints.

scholarly journals In Search for the Adaptive Self: A Model of Adaptive Self-Concept

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 309-328
Author(s):  
Tomasz Jankowski ◽  
Wacław Bąk
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Cognitive Model ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Concept ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Optimal Functioning ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Social Cognitive Model ◽  
The Relationship

The main aim of this article is to present a descriptive social-cognitive model of the adaptive self-concept (ASC) which integrates knowledge concerning the relationship between two aspects of the self—self-awareness and self-knowledge—and optimal functioning. We propose that adaptive self-awareness is moderately frequent, non-ruminative, focused on inner states, and motivated by curiosity. Adaptive self-knowledge is defined as accurate, complex, integrated and consisting of easily accessible self-beliefs, both abstract and concrete. The broader context for the ASC model is discussed, including its regulatory and interpersonal functions and factors which influence ASC development. The limitations of the model are discussed and suggestions are made for future investigations.

scholarly journals Pylyp Orlyk sam pro sebe

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Walentyna Sobol
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Self Knowledge

This article explores various forms of self-presentation of the hetman on the path of self-knowledge in the conditions of hopelessness caused by emigration. Pylyp Orlyk’s handwritten diary of 1725, 1726, and 1727 is dominated by motives of accustoming to emigration conditions, protection of privacy, discourses, illness and recovery, friendship, solitude with reading, and finally, more clearly than before, the self-awareness of the soul. “Peregrine”, as Orlyk calls himself in 1727, after eighteen years of emigration. He orders two or three services at once for the children on their birthdays, for the health of his wife Anna of the Hercyk family. Orlyk visits all the churches in Thessaloniki, is a good Christian, but nowhere emphasizes his denomination. He believes in the power of praying for the health of his family and friends. Sincere prayer becomes medicine. One of the described disasters of that time is perceived today in a very modern way - “bad air”. This euphemism is repeated in the manuscript when it comes to the plague pandemic in Thessaloniki, Smyrna, Istanbul.

scholarly journals Augustine’s Self-Knowledge in Animals

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karel Klozar
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Information ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Internal Sense

This paper focuses on Augustine’s concept of self-knowledge or self-awareness in non-rational animals through examining the relation between external senses, internal sense and rationality. The explanation of what causes motion in non-rational living beings is quite puzzling in the case of animal’s self-perception – for what reason do they move, sense or live. This motivation is also connected to the self-preservation principle, which is one of the two sources of confusion regarding self-perception in animals; the other one is the ability of internal sense or anima to perceive themselves, other animals and humans as alive – in spite of the fact that this can in no way be sensory information.

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