The Self and Its Society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Moran
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Internal Dialogue ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conversational Partner

Throughout the history of philosophy, relations to oneself have been modeled on intersubjective relations, as the “internalization” of possible relations with others. Plato describes thought itself as a kind of internal dialogue, and Kant grounds normativity on “self-legislation” and the possibility of obligations to oneself. The conscience is pictured as an “internalized other.” This chapter argues for “self-other asymmetries” governing speech and interlocution which limit the sense in which a person can be her own interlocutor, or treat either a part of herself or a temporal stage of herself as such a conversational partner (Korsgaard, Dummett). The chapter revisits the related claims of Anscombe and Cavell that “believing someone” does not have a first-person reflexive form, and develops the idea of the two forms of agency expressed in speech.

Sacrificing for

On Sacrifice ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moshe Halbertal
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Potential Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Transcendence

This chapter analyzes how the movement of the self to self-transcendence has been articulated in different ways in the history of philosophy. In his phenomenology of the sacrificial aspect of political violence, Paul Kahn observes that the double aspect of sacrifice—self and other—continues to this day. The chapter considers the potential relationship between self-sacrifice and violence in war by briefly analyzing the laws of war. In addition, it studies how origin narratives of states and political or religious communities sometimes refer to heroic sacrifices performed by the founding generation. A past sacrifice can become a binding political constraint on present-day politicians. With the burden of an earlier sacrifice, the issue is not about withdrawing from a losing situation and maximizing utility but is instead a concern about retroactive desecration.

Substance and Selfhood

Philosophy ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 66 (255) ◽  
pp. 81-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. J. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Change ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Substance

How could the self be a substance? There are various ways in which it could be, some familiar from the history of philosophy. I shall be rejecting these more familiar substantivalist approaches, but also the non-substantival theories traditionally opposed to them. I believe that the self is indeed a substance—in fact, that it is a simple or noncomposite substance—and, perhaps more remarkably still, that selves are, in a sense, self-creating substances. Of course, if one thinks of the notion of substance as an outmoded relic of prescientific metaphysics—as the notion of some kind of basic and perhaps ineffable stuff—then the suggestion that the self (or indeed anything) is a substance may appear derisory. Even what we ordinarily call ‘stuffs’—gold and water and butter and the like—are, it seems, more properly conceived of as aggregates of molecules or atoms, while the latter are not appropriately to be thought of as being ‘made’ of any kind of ‘stuff’ at all. But this only goes to show that we need to think in terms of a more sophisticated notion of substance—one which may ultimately be traced back to Aristotle's conception of a ‘primary substance’ in the Categories, and whose heir in modern times is W. E. Johnson's notion of the ‘continuant’. It is the notion, that is, of a concrete individual capable of persisting identically through qualitative change, a subject of alterable predicates that is not itself predicable of any further subject.

scholarly journals "Fare filosofia" e "fare storia della filosofia": divorzio o convivenza?

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-28
Author(s):  
Gregorio Piaia
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
History Of

The present work proposes a reflexion about difficulties involved in the distinction between “doing philosophy” and “making history of philosophy”. We support the convenience of this problematic distinction, but in a way that the coexistence of the two perspectives guarantees mutyal enrichment. In particular, we insist that the second perspective promotes an attitude that is more open to understanding the distinct ways in which the human being has tried to acces to the truth, and that avoids the self-sufficiency in which the first risks falling.

Epistrophe and Metanoia in the History of Philosophy

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-210
Author(s):  
Pierre Hadot ◽  
Andrew Irvine ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Living Organism ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of

Crucial in Pierre Hadot’s account of ancient philosophy as a way of life is the phenomenon of conversion. Well before he encountered some of the decisive influences upon his understanding of philosophy, Hadot already understood ancient philosophy and its long legacy in later thinkers of the West as much more than a formal discourse. Philosophy is an experience, or at least the exploration and articulation of a potential for experience. The energy of this potential originates in a polar tension between epistrophe (return) and metanoia (rebirth). The two poles, which are grounded in primal experiences of the living organism, motivate and model the conversion which must be lived by the philosopher. The genius of Western philosophical experience lies in the effort to synthesize return and rebirth, and thereby recover the self as an ontological point of identification with and origin of the cosmos.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zuckert
Keyword(s):  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
History Of

This chapter reviews Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. The book displays Taylor’s mastery not only of the history of philosophy, but of theology, poetry, and art. He also shares Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s commitment to synthesizing competing and conflicting elements of the culture. Unlike Hegel, however, Taylor does not see philosophy as the highest and truest expression of the human mind or spirit; rather he sees the artists—the poets most especially—as the ones who “can put us in contact with” what we as living and thinking humans need to be in contact with. This chapter examines Taylor’s arguments as articulated in Sources of the Self, especially his view that human beings are self-interpreting and self-misinterpreting animals and that self-interpretation has ontological significance. It also considers what Taylor identifies as a “phenomenology” of human action, his theory of morality and identity, and his concept of the “punctual self.”

Diderot, the Self, and the Science of Dreaming

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-232
Author(s):  
Charly Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Philosophy And Religion ◽  
Science Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dream State ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter presents Denis Diderot’s philosophy of the self in light of debates over the neuroscientific turn in historical research. Recent literature features an ideal of self-ownership that the history of philosophy shows to be radically contingent. Situating Diderot’s articles on dreaming and distraction in the Encyclopédie within the context of eighteenth-century theological and medical reflections on the self’s command over its ideas and actions, the chapter interrogates the relationship between science, philosophy, and religion. The dream state fascinated Diderot precisely because its structure and content allowed his contemporaries to reflect upon the fate of the human subject in a materially determined world.

L’ipséité et non le moi : promesses et potentialités d’un concept

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-156
Author(s):  
Claude Romano
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Inner Core ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Intrinsic Connection ◽  
Ontological Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Being

Does Heidegger really have a “theory of the self ” in the same way as, say, Descartes, Locke or Husserl? This is what has often been concluded bymany interpreters of Being and Time, and it is that view that this paper challenges. Heidegger not only rejects the supposition of a substantial ego, along the lines of Descartes’ conception, but he also repudiates, more generally, any “self ” understood as a present-at-hand being, an inner core of Dasein, as he insists on the intrinsic connection between the “egologies,” from Descartes to Husserl, and “traditional ontology”. The fundamental-ontological approach of Selbstheit and Selbstsein, that is, ipseity and Beingoneself, constitutes rather a complete paradigm-shift in the history of Modern philosophy, and a complete break with the egologies as a whole, since both concepts refer only to “ways of being” or “ways of existing” of Dasein. Insofar as its novelty is acknowledged, the concept of ipseity may thus also be taken as an heuristic tool to investigate the history of philosophy, and especially to reformulate in slightly different terms the problem that was at the centre of the courses on « subjectivity and truth » of the late Foucault

First-Person Plural

Theater ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
Daniel Sack
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Green Screen ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
Self Reference

In Daniel Sack’s discussion of Nicola Gunn’s dramatic oeuvre, he finds a through line running between her works—one of self-reference and autofiction, a kind of playful knowledge of the self. In tracing this affinity between her pieces, in particular In the Sans Hotel, In Spite of Myself, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster, and Green Screen, Sack identifies the ways in which Gunn’s work speaks to both a contemporary moment in theater and the history of performance art, acknowledging the different baggage of the forms she references while coyly and fluently crossing between them. Sack sees in Gunn’s work the creation of heterotopias, places that open out onto an elsewhere, toward realities that simultaneously exist outside of the world and connect its disparate cultural manifestations together, from identity to ethics, politics to performance.

What Have the Historians Ever Done for Us?

2018 ◽  
pp. 18-35
Author(s):  
Hans-Johann Glock
Keyword(s):  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
History Of Analytic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship between substantive philosophy and the history of philosophy, using the debate about analytic philosophy’s attitude towards the history of the subject as a guide to a more general assessment of historicism. While studying the past is not essential to substantive philosophy, it is useful. But it also harbours risks, as pointed out by thinkers as diverse as Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. These risks are discussed by looking at four recent historicist trends within analytic philosophy: precursorism, the general ‘reflective turn’ towards the history of philosophy, the more specific ‘historical turn’ towards the history of analytic philosophy, and the self-reflective concern with the historiography of analytic philosophy. The chatper conclude that the benefits of doing philosophy historically outweigh the drawbacks; in any event, even if the history of philosophy were irrelevant to substantive philosophy it would still be a respectable discipline.

Subject, Education, Truth

1998 ◽  
pp. 176-179
Author(s):  
Ludmila A. Mikeshina
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Self Care ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
History Of

Two processes develop in human culture and society that implicate each other. The first is, according to Hegel, the development of universal experience and knowledge in any individual since individuals are never born complete as what they are supposed to be. The second is the subjectivization of the universal experience and knowledge into unique and singular forms of the self and self-consciousness. An analysis of these two processes in the history of philosophy has revealed the interconnections between the cognizing subject, truth and education and paideia. A hermeneutical principle of "self-care" that develops the skill of ruling and caring for others represents one of the traditions that includes these features in unity and determines a type of paideia. This principle is developed by Socratic, Platonic, Epicurean and Stoic morality, and was actualized by Descartes in his movement to the cogito. "Self-care" was considered in the 17th century as a condition of acquiring scientific knowledge; later, however, it was labeled as egotism and individualism and replaced by self-cognition. Foucault gives proof of the necessity to revive the "self-care" principle in its initial sense as a foundation of the modern hermeneutical conception of upbringing. Hence, the role of philosophy as "an adviser" or "tutor" is to be revived in the process.

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