scholarly journals ‘I do not cognize myself through being conscious of myself as thinking’: Self-knowledge and the irreducibility of self-objectification in Kant

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (7) ◽  
pp. 956-979
Author(s):  
Thomas Khurana
Keyword(s):  
Inner Sense ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Self Objectification ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe paper argues that Kant'sdistinction between pure and empirical apperception cannot be interpreted as distinguishing two self-standing types of self-knowledge. For Kant, empirical and pure apperception need to co-operate to yield substantive self-knowledge. What makes Kant'saccount interesting is his acknowledgment that there is a deep tension between the way I become conscious of myself as subject through pure apperception and the way I am given to myself as an object of inner sense. This tension remains problematic in the realm of theoretical cognition but can be put to work and made productive in terms of practical self-knowledge.

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.

Nitty-Gritty

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Parini
Keyword(s):  
Teaching Profession ◽  
Scholarly Journals ◽  
New Information ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Getting Lost ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
First Job ◽  
The Way

Okay, you’ve got your first job. I was there, 30 years ago, but— unfortunately—there was nobody around to write me the sort of letter I’m writing to you. I don’t even know you, but I feel a certain responsibility, mostly because I want to spare you some of the mistakes I made, to make your life in the classroom, in the academic village, a little easier. Like all advice, you can take it or leave it. One of the main things I can say to you is that every teacher, like every person, is different. You have to teach out of who you are. That is the only way you will succeed, as a professional, as a teacher and scholar, as a member of the community of scholars. You will have to adapt anything I say here to your own private vision, to some version of yourself. The essential journey in this profession is toward self-knowledge; this will involve getting lost in order to get found, losing your thread, having to revise your sense of reality over and over, frequently adjusting to new information, new contexts. In modeling this revisionary path, you will help your students to learn how to forge their own paths. I will assume that you went into the teaching profession because you thought you had a gift for teaching or scholarship—or both. You liked a few teachers along the way and you thought you could emulate their success. Perhaps you were just fascinated by the field: literature, physics, whatever. You wanted to spend your life around people fascinated by this field, who take their work in a given subject seriously. You liked, perhaps, the smell of the lab or library, the feel of scholarly journals in your hands. You enjoyed hearing intelligent people argue. That is probably as good a place to begin as anywhere, but you nevertheless have to make your way in the profession: among students and among your colleagues, some of whom will vote on your tenure. Again I will return to the basic advice: be yourself, but build on that notion, adding to yourself, amplifying yourself.

Lower Strata, Older Races, and Aboriginal Peoples: Racial Anthropology and Mythical History Past and Present

1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sumit Guha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Culture ◽  
South Asians ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Way

As K. Sivaramakrishnan has pointed out in a paper published in 1993, one of the persistent ironies of postcoloniality “has been the way elites assuming the task of building a national culture and providing it with a liberatory/progressive history have turned to modes of knowledge and reconstruction produced in the colonial period.” And of the varied strands that have constituted the twentieth-century knowledge and self-knowledge of India, none is more central than the notion of the timeless, conservative caste, and its antediluvian ancestor, the unchanging primitive tribe (Sivaramakrishnan 1993; Inden 1990, 70–72). In this view South Asians, like other unprogressive people, did not change—they merely accumulated, with the latest addition to the population overlaying its predecessor, much as geological strata did. This paper will attempt to expose the historic roots and explore the contemporary ramifications of this model.

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.

Some Recent Approaches

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Linguistic Expression ◽  
Inner Sense ◽  
Self Knowledge

Chapter 2 argued that the failings of the inner-sense theory are often more apparent than real. In any event, recent approaches to self-knowledge are usually advertised as taking a radically different route. This chapter surveys and criticizes three prominent examples, due to Davidson, Moran, and Bar-On. They illustrate how radically different accounts of self-knowledge can be, despite having some overlapping themes. All three philosophers emphasize the linguistic expression of self-knowledge. Moran and Bar-On both think the main problems are in important respects not epistemological. Davidson and Moran concentrate on the propositional attitudes, belief in particular, and suggest that another approach entirely will be required for knowledge of one’s sensations.

Introduction

Soliloquies ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
Michael P. Foley
Keyword(s):  
Human Soul ◽  
Philosophical Dialogue ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Philosophical Life ◽  
Subordinate Role ◽  
The Way

This chapter presents an overview of St. Augustine's Soliloquies. The completion of the first two books of the Soliloquies in the winter of A.D. 386/387 was a groundbreaking accomplishment. Although the philosophical dialogue was by then a well-established genre, it was unprecedented to have an entire work devoted to a conversation between a man and himself. Part of the originality of the Soliloquies lies in its personification of Reason, who serves as Augustine's sole interlocutor. In an earlier dialogue, Augustine had narrated a scenario in which Reason speaks to himself; in the Soliloquies, Augustine augments this conceit by depicting Reason speaking on his own and directly to Augustine. In addition, it is unusual in a philosophical dialogue for the character that best epitomizes the philosophical life to assume a subordinate role. If the Soliloquies contributes to the quest for self-knowledge, it also shines a light on some of the obstacles in the way. Much of the Soliloquies is also devoted to the question of whether the human soul is immortal.

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.

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