The Self, Misc

I present a paradox concerning a person who desires to fail to achieve the goal that matters most to them. I recently encountered a similar paradox, but radical solipsism is a solution to it. This is not a solution to the paradox that I present.

This paper is written in the form of a philosophical essay rather than a technical academic article. It examines the assumption of a separate subject as a structural feature of thought rather than as an established ontological fact. Beginning from the formulation “Everything is Nothing,” the essay explores how the idea of a centered subject emerges through language, abstraction, and narrative continuity, and how this assumption shapes experience, fear, control, and the understanding of knowledge. -/- The text argues that subjectivity (...) is not discovered but inferred, arising from linguistic and cultural habits that reify processes into entities. By analyzing themes such as human embeddedness in environment, the role of language in producing metaphysical illusions, the misdirection of self-care, and the fear of death as fear of dissolution, the essay develops a view of reality as process without a central owner or observer. -/- Rather than proposing a method, practice, or metaphysical system, the essay offers a conceptual reorientation: an examination of what remains when the assumption of a separate subject is withdrawn, and how meaning, knowledge, and action appear in the absence of a center. (shrink)

If there is a plurality of absolutely separate individual conscious existences, corresponding to individual living organisms, then the directly experienced fact that only a particular one of these consciousnesses, one's own, stands out as immediately present, can not be true absolutely, but only relative to some specific context of conditions and qualifications singling out that particular consciousness. But further consideration demonstrates that it is not possible for any such context to be specified. This implies that all conscious existences must ultimately (...) be united as, or in, some single conscious entity underlying the apparent plurality of individuals. (shrink)

This paper isolates a symmetry result about first-person individuation under perfect phenomenal duplication. If two experiential events share identical phenomenal character—and, in a strengthened version, share all uncentered publicly specifiable correlates—nothing in the shared phenomenal profile can privilege one instance as uniquely mine. Any determinate self-location fact therefore requires an external index not carried by phenomenal character itself. I present the result as the First-Person Symmetry Lemma, supply a proof-style argument and a centered-world gloss, and address objections including type/token conflation, (...) spacetime individuation, token-reflexive semantics, haecceitism, and phenomenal mineness. The upshot is a principled boundary: even maximally complete uncentered description can underdetermine centered individuation in idealized duplication cases. (shrink)

This essay explores the connection between theories of the self and theories of self-knowledge, arguing (a) that empirical results strongly support a certain negative thesis about the self, a thesis about what the self isn’t, and (b) that a more promising account of the self makes available unorthodox – but likely apt – ways of characterizing self-knowledge. Regarding (a), I argue that the human self does not appear at a personal level the autonomous (or quasi-autonomous) status of which might provide (...) a natural home for a self that can be investigated reliably from the first-person perspective, independent of the empirical sciences. Regarding (b), I contend that the most promising alternative view of the self is revisionary: the self is to be identified with the cognitive system as a whole, the relatively integrated collection of mechanisms that produces intelligent behavior (Rupert 2009, 2010, 2019). The cognitive system teems with reliable, though not necessarily perfect, indicators (cf. Dretske 1988) of its own properties or of the properties of its proper parts, many of which are available for detection by, or the control of, further processes, such as motor control. I argue that indicating states should be treated as potential vehicles of self-knowledge, regardless of whether they are truth-evaluable states, such as beliefs. The investigation of self and self-knowledge frames discussion of a final topic, of some gravity: the way in which self-knowledge might contribute to self-improvement. In this regard, I emphasize the efficacy of certain forms of alignment between, on the one hand, elements of the cognitive system corresponding to a more commonsense-based conception of the self and, on the other hand, processes associated with what is frequently referred to as ‘implicit’ cognitive processing (Evans and Frankish 2009). (shrink)

Many ideas from Georg Nortoff’s works (published one paper in 2010, mainly his book in 2011, other papers in 2012, 2103, 2014, especially those related to Kant’s philosophy and the notion of the “observer”, the mind-brain problem, default mode network, the self, the mental states and their “correspondence” to the brain) are surprisingly very similar to my ideas published in my article from 2002, 2005 and my book from 2008. In two papers from 2002 (also my paper from 2005 and (...) my book 2008), following Kant’s philosophy, I introduced the notion of the “observer” for the mind-brain problem. After 2010, Nortoff also uses Kant’s philosophy and the notion of the “observer” for the mind-brain problem in a methodology very similar to my methodology (even if his knowledge about Kant’s transcendental philosophy is very superficial!). Moreover, instead of EDWs, Nortoff uses a kind of “transdisciplinary” view, quite close to parallelism – the closest approach to my approach. Northoff’s conclusion within the unicorn world is different than my conclusion. However, in his book 2014 (two volumes) using notions like “correlations” and even “correspondences” many times (exactly my main notion from EDWs perspective), his conclusion is very closed to my EDWs! This dramatic change of framework in 3 years is quite unbelievable!!! (shrink)

In this paper I examine a new variant of the well-known idea that the self is an abstract object. I propose a simple model of the self as a property of temporal slices of a body's history. I argue that this model, when combined with even a modest realism with regard to properties, implies that the self has many of the chief features traditionally attributed to selves. I conclude that this model allows one to reconcile the full reality of the (...) self with even the most deflationary materialistic theories of consciousness. (shrink)

This paper extends the case in 'Conscious Thought Under Sensory Deprivation'. It then presents an overlooked puzzle for scholars of Ibn Sina. It concludes by identifying other contexts in which Ibn Sina deploys the general method of the Flying Man — a method that, in his moral philosophy, resembles the Enlightenment social-contract tradition. Could modern liberalism have its roots in Islamic philosophy?

This paper is primarily about metaphysics; specifically, about a Cartesian view of the self, according to which it is a simple, enduring, non-material entity.I take a critical look at Nida-Rümelin’s novel conceptual arguments for this view and argue that they don’t give us decisive reasons to uphold the Cartesian view. But in Nida-Rümelin’s view, what is at stake in these arguments is not merely theoretical: the truth – and our beliefs about it – has practical consequences as well. In her (...) view, if the Cartesian simple view of the self were false, we would have no reason to love and care for family and friends, and our special interest in our own future would be pointless. In the last section of this paper, I will say something about the sense in which it is right and the sense in which it is wrong to think that the metaphysics of the self has broader relevance for our lives. (shrink)

There are better and worse ways to acquire epistemic virtues and more generally to be disposed to change or maintain one’s epistemic dispositions over time. This is a dimension along which one might be better or worse as an epistemic agent that, we argue, cannot be explained with reference to current normative categories in epistemology but requires recognition of a new norm or virtue—namely, “epistemic authenticity”— which is the central virtue in a novel class of virtues (or norms) of epistemic (...) development. We sketch the contours of an account of personal authenticity and then consider the nature and value of a specifically epistemic form. (shrink)

Purpose – Contemporary technology has been implicated in the rise of perfectionism, a personality trait that is associated with depression, suicide and other ills. is paper explores how technology can be developed to promote an alternative to perfectionism, which is a self- constructionist ethic. Design/methodology/approach – is paper takes the form of a philosophical discussion. A conceptual framework is developed by connecting the literature on perfectionism and personal meaning with discussions in information ethics on the self, the ontic trust and (...) technologies of the self. To illustrate these themes, the example of selfies and self-portraits is discussed. Findings – e self today must be understood as both individualistic and relational, i.e., hybrid; the trouble is balance. To realize balance, the self should be recognized as part of the ontic trust to which all information organisms and objects belong. us technologically-mediated self-care takes on a deeper urgency. e selfie is one example of a technology for self-care that has gone astray (i.e., lost some of its care-conducive aspects), but this can be remedied if selfie-making technology incorporates relevant aspects of self-portraiture. is example provides a path for developing self- constructionist and meaningful technologies more generally. Practical implications – Technology development should proceed with self-care and meaning in mind. e comparison of selfies and self-portraits, situated historically and theoretically, provides some guidance in this regard. Some specific avenues for development are presented. Originality/value – e question of the self has not been much discussed in information ethics. is paper links the self to the ontic trust: the self can be fruitfully understood as an agent within the ontic trust to which we all belong. (shrink)

The Self-Evidencing Agent offers a unique method for addressing difficult philosophical questions. Self-evidencing occurs when an agent uses their model of the world and of themselves to explain what they observe in the world and in themselves, such that those observations become evidence for their model – the more agents explain, the more they self-evidence. This book argues that there is good reason to cast an agent’s existence itself in terms of self-evidencing, and that if we begin from this as (...) a first principle, then we can make better sense of who and what we are, of how we engage in diverse ways with the world, and what matters to us. Self-evidencing can help situate attention, action, and perception. It also furnishes compelling approaches to decision-making and rationality, the self, of preferences and values. It can build bridges to consciousness, and even on to free will, and to meaning and wisdom. (shrink)

According to some views of consciousness, when I experience the taste of mango, I also have an inner awareness of that mango-taste experience. What is this inner awareness? A common way to characterize a mental state type is in terms of its characteristic content and attitude. This is what I propose to do in this paper. I argue (a) that conscious experiences constitute the characteristic content of inner awareness, and (b) that the characteristic attitude of inner awareness is that of (...) representing-as-occurring-now-in-me this content. (shrink)

Perdurantists hold that persons have temporal parts. But which of the objects is conscious—persons, their temporal parts, both? In this paper, I argue that Perdurantists have good metaphysical motivation to believe that, strictly speaking, it is the cosmos and only the cosmos that exhibits consciousness—hence, strictly speaking, neither persons nor their temporal parts are conscious. I argue for such “Cosmic-Perdurantism” by arguing that only the cosmos exhibits mass, and pairing this claim with reductive physicalism about the mind.

This paper does three things. First, it presents a new interpretation of Avicenna’s influential argument, the Flying Man. One nice feature of this interpretation is that it vindicates the argument’s validity. Unlike the cogito-inspired case for dualism, the Flying Man isn’t undermined by neglect of referential opacity. Second, it compares Avicenna’s argument with Anscombe’s take on the possibility of conscious thought under sensory deprivation. Finally, the paper concludes with a brief critical assessment. Several possibilities are considered.

Eliminativist microphysical nihilism (EMN) is the view that there are many submicroscopic simples but no other material objects, and neither you nor I nor any ordinary objects exist. I defend a Cogito-based argument against EMN: (1) I am conscious; (2) if so, then I exist; therefore (3) I exist. I address those who deny (1) but concede that some surrogate is certain. The surrogates I consider include: <if all the simples were just as they actually are but these simples composed (...) something, I would be conscious>, <some things are collectively conscious>, <there is an experience>, <this is an experience>, and <these are collectively conscious>. I offer an abductive argument for the view, Cartesianism, that (1) itself is certain. I specify four logically complex propositions about consciousness that everyone should take to be certain, and I argue that Cartesianism better explains the certainty of these four propositions than its EMN-friendly alternatives. I call the argument the Abductive Meta-Cogito. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that felt discontinuity of self plays a role in recovery from substance use disorders. We rely on a view of the self that identifies continuity of the self with the maintenance of a self-concept, and we use it to propose an explanation of how individuals with substance use disorders form concepts of self around those disorders. We argue further that individuals can experience a discontinuity of self, that is, an identity crisis, in two ways. First, (...) a person with a substance use disorder might experience a discontinuity of self when they attempt to maintain a self established prior to developing a substance use disorder. This type of identity crisis might motivate recovery as the individual will seek to resolve it through attempts to maintain an earlier concept of self that is not centered on substance use. Second, a person might experience a discontinuity of self as they seek to establish a self that is not grounded in substance use, which might make recovery more difficult by the need to establish a new concept of self. (shrink)

This article presents a novel interpretation of True Mind theories in Buddhism, drawing inspiration from Zongmi’s teachings, according to which: (1) we are the same mind as the cosmic True Mind, and (2) the essence of the True Mind is reflexive awareness devoid of content, whereas its conditioned function is reflexive awareness with content. This proposal aims to reconcile the tension between the concept of the permanent True Mind as our True Self and the Buddhist doctrines of universal emptiness and (...) no-self. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo, analizamos el cuento El Inmortal de Borges prestándole principal atención a las situaciones donde se entrelazan, o se tratan sin diferenciar demasiado, cuestiones vinculadas con la animalidad y la divinidad. Sostenemos que esta especie de confusión o falta de precisión al tratar cuestiones que se alejan tanto de la identidad personal y del Yo, como la inmortalidad, no es un elemento casual ni sin fundamento, sino que puede ser analizado filosóficamente adentrándonos la otredad animal. El Inmortal (...) nos manifiesta que la filosofía podría no haber sido lo suficientemente precisa al tratar la otredad, permitiendo que animalidad y divinidad, o más bien ciertas propiedades características de cada una, puedan amalgamarse dentro de los lindes de este concepto. Que el cuento de Borges haga convivir de forma tan característica la inacción con la inmortalidad hace de esta obra un objeto de reflexión obligatorio para todos los interesados en el concepto de otredad. (shrink)

Intuitively, it seems that imagination plays a large role in our decision-making and thus in bringing about personal transformation. We imagine different futures for ourselves, and then we imaginatively explore which of these futures might be best. Recently, however, several philosophers have expressed skepticism about the ability of imagination to be as useful to us in these contexts as we might have thought. In particular, when the futures being imagined are radically different from anything that we have heretofore encountered, the (...) skeptics charge that imagination is unreliable, since what the transformation will really be like is imaginatively out of reach. In this chapter, after an introduction to imagination and the role it plays in decision-making, I explore the case for pessimism. Via an exploration of two different cases for an optimistic approach, I ultimately conclude that we should reject the pessimist’s claim. Imagination indeed serves as a transformative force in our lives. (shrink)

This essay addresses personal identity and its role in sustaining moral responsibility. Against reductionist accounts, namely Derek Parfit’s, which tie identity to degrees of psychological continuity, I argue that such views weaken the foundations of responsibility and risk, rendering practices like blame, praise, and obligation incoherent. If identity dissolves with psychological change, responsibility for past wrongs becomes negotiable, undermining ethical life. To respond to this danger, I develop the idea of the normative self: an identity constituted through the integration of (...) past actions, present commitments, and future aspirations within a coherent narrative. Unlike reductionist models, this account does not merely approximate but in fact captures how selfhood is lived and understood—both from the first-person perspective of individuals who take ownership of their lives and from the third-person perspective of communities that hold one another responsible. Descriptive or reductionist models, I argue, ultimately fail precisely because they cannot adequately explain this dual orientation. I conclude that it is only by conceiving the self as normative that our practices of accountability, recognition, and renewal make coherent sense. Methodologically, I combine analytic critique with narrative and phenomenological approaches, engaging Parfit and Bernard Williams and testing their theories against real and hypothetical cases of wrongdoing, reform, and accountability. The result is a conception of the self that secures responsibility as both backward- and forward-looking, grounding our moral realities in a structure that preserves stability while enabling transformation. (shrink)

A critical assessment of the second chapter of Samuel Fleischacker’s Being Me Being You, where Fleischacker makes use of Smith’s account of empathy to develop a distinctive Smithian conception of ‘humanity’.

What are we? Are we, for example, souls, organisms, brains, or something else? In this book, Andrew Brenner argues that there are principled obstacles to our discovering the answer to this fundamental metaphysical question. The main competing accounts of personal ontology hold that we are either souls (or composites of soul and body), or we are composite physical objects of some sort, but, as Brenner shows, arguments for either of these options can be parodied and transformed into their opposites. Brenner (...) also examines arguments for and against the existence of the self, offers a detailed discussion of the metaphysics of several afterlife scenarios - resurrection, reincarnation, and mind uploading -- and considers whether agnosticism with respect to personal ontology should lead us to agnosticism with respect to the possibility of life after death. (shrink)

Recent analytic-philosophical works in the field of situated cognition have proposed to conceptualize the self as deeply entwined with the environment, and even as constituted by it. A common move has been to characterize the self in narrative terms, and then to argue that the narrative self is partly constituted by narratives about the past that are scaffolded (shaped and maintained) by, or distributed over, a variety of objects that can rekindle episodic memories. While we are sympathetic to these approaches, (...) here we propose a different strategy to situate the self—one which can be seen as complementing the narrative one, and which draws from concepts and ideas central to the phenomenological-existentialist tradition. We suggest, first, that the self has a sense of its past not just via narratives and episodic memories, but in virtue of being embodied and thus, importantly, _sedimented_ (in other words, it has, or rather is, a _body memory_). Embodiment and sedimentation, in turn, always necessarily imply an environment or a situation, entailing that the self is also _inherently situated_. Second, we discuss the future-oriented dimension of selfhood, and argue that we understand ourselves as _projected_ into the future, again not necessarily only narratively and reflectively, but also tacitly, in a bodily and inherently situated way. (shrink)

The central claim here is that the self is an emergent experiential, information processing and behavioral system that arises reflexively in the conscious subject and a body setting that is organized and primed with many of the required processes in place. These processes and their associated functions represent our world as coherent and temporally unified within the construct of a developing and roughly continuous experiencer-agent, or self. These representations are not, however, copies of the external world. In this way, selves (...) develop as temporal subjects; as active and complex informational, dispositional, belief-driven and memory-driven configurations of mental states with unique (personal) properties that interact. They are robust and pivotal subsystems of our global mental organization and are suffused with the phenomenality of perception. As constructs in internal and external time, selves have histories, memories, beliefs, skills, cognitive capacities, attitudes, standpoints, social and emotional equities, pre-dispositions and default responses. Yet they are neither causally nor ontologically reducible to their embodied physical states. They are, rather, implemented in them. The body, I maintain, is a necessary but insufficient condition for the occurrence of a self. (shrink)

In recent years, narrative accounts of the self have gained increasing attention. It is widely accepted that humans are storytelling creatures, that stories shape our self-conception, and that we fail to be agents without a narrative framework. While there is less agreement on what constitutes a narrative, it is generally understood to be more than a chronological listing of life events; it is also an account of the explanatory relationships among these events—a story of how events lead to other events. (...) However, specifying the nature of this explanatory relationship has proven difficult. As critics have pointed out, narrativists often resort to simplistic notions of narrative when faced with criticism. The concept of narrative explanation needs to be elaborated in a way that is both substantive enough to exclude trivial behaviours from being considered narratives and nonrestrictive enough to accommodate ordinary lives that may not be particularly story-like. In this paper, I review existing accounts of narrative explanation and propose a teleological account, according to which narratives consist of goal-directed explanations of a sequence of events. I argue that a teleological account of narrative explanation can be a fruitful way to clarify the concept of “narrative” in the context of the narrative self by addressing the most common objections. (shrink)

Descartes claimed that the Cogito is ‘so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it’. This paper aims to demonstrate that this claim is false by presenting a sceptical scenario for the Cogito. It is argued that the story ‘The Circular Ruins’ by J. L. Borges illustrates that one can doubt one’s own existence and that pace Descartes (and many others) the claim ‘I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it (...) is put forward by me or conceived in my mind’ is false. (shrink)

The view that constitutive panpsychism faces a subject combination problem is rooted in the ‘Jamesian’ intuition: the intuition that multiple subjects do not simply sum into a greater, composite subject. Most commentators on the subject combination problem seem to take the Jamesian intuition as an unbudgeable psychological given. This has led to the popularity of emergentist and ‘bonding’ solutions. But emergentist solutions face the same sorts of issue as physicalist emergentism, while bonding solutions are ad hoc and mysterian. Therefore I (...) propose we backtrack, and reexamine how unbudgeable the Jamesian intuition really is. A thin conception of subjects, adumbrated here, permits us to build a positive conception of subjects summing into subjects. There is a number of arguments purporting to show why this sort of pursuit is futile, effectively defending the Jamesian intuition, but I argue that they fail. I also include a critique of the transparency of subjectivity, a principle which has been used to legitimise anti-subject-summing intuitions. By renouncing the Jamesian intuition we clear the way to accepting a metaphysical position according to which subjects really do sum into subjects. This dissolves the subject combination problem, effectively sparing constitutive panpsychism from what is generally regarded to be its most troublesome issue. (shrink)

There is only one universe. There is only one person in this universe.

Can we hold agents responsible for their implicitly biased behavior? The aim of this text is to show that, from the nurturing stance, holding subjects responsible for their implicitly biased behavior is justified, even though they are not blameworthy. First, I will introduce the nurturing stance as Daphne Brandenburg originally developed it. Second, I will specify what holding somebody responsible from the nurturing stance amounts to. Third, I show how and why holding responsible can help a subject develop an impaired (...) capacity. Fourth, I analyze empirical data about holding prejudiced subjects responsible and highlight that the internal motivation to control prejudiced reactions decreases implicit attitudes’ influences. Furthermore, the data show that in order to be appropriate moral demands have to acknowledge the target's autonomy and competence. In sum, from the nurturing stance, holding implicitly biased subjects responsible is appropriate if they can adequately respond to the moral demands. (shrink)

Samuel Fleischacker’s Being Me Being You: Adam Smith & Empathy offers a new interpretation of Adam Smith’s conception of empathy—or ‘sympathy’, as Smith referred to the phenomenon in The Theory of...

El presente artículo es un comentario al texto de la Teodicea de Antonio Rosmini, pensador italiano del siglo XIX, con el objetivo de vislumbrar algunos puntos clave sobre la participación del hombre en el mal. En primer lugar, se analizará como Rosmini propone la distinción entre el mal metafísico y el mal moral y, por consecuencia, entre limitación y privación. En segundo lugar, se ahondará cómo este autor explica la temática del sufrimiento del mal en cuanto experiencia de crecimiento a (...) nivel de la virtud humana, para la sociedad entera y para el individuo, sin negar el dolor de quien sufre. (shrink)

In classical South Asia, most philosophers thought that the self (if it exists at all) is what the first-person pronoun ‘I’ stands for. It is something that persists through time, undergoes conscious thoughts and experiences, and exercises control over actions. The Buddhists accepted the ‘no self’ thesis: they denied that such a self is substantially real. This gave rise to a puzzle for these Buddhists. If there is nothing substantially real that ‘I’ stands for, what are we talking about when (...) we speak of ourselves? In this paper, I present one Buddhist answer to this question, an answer that emerges from the work of the Abhidharma thinker Vasubandhu (4th to 5th century CE). (shrink)

This is the outline: 1. Introduction : organicisme et personnalisme 2. Un effort pour philosopher sur tout 3. La théologie et la question de l’infra-substantiel 3.1 Un schème de pensée qui pose problème 3.2 Le statut de l’immortalité 4. Substance, personne et cosmos.

The use of brain technology that contributes to psychological changes has spurred a debate about personal identity. Some argue that neurotechnology does not undermine personal continuity (Levy, 2011) while others argue that it does (Kreitmair, 2019; Schechtman, 2010). To make these assessments, commentators fail to identify psychological changes that cause personal discontinuity. In this paper, I present a view that identifies personal continuity with the maintenance of a self-concept. I argue that a concept of self requires the ability to self-ascribe (...) physical and psychological features and that the diachronic self emerges with self-ascriptions of features that require endurance over time. I maintain that an adequate concept of self does not depend on the maintenance of any particular combination of self-ascriptions and that it can be maintained despite even significant changes in psychological or physical traits. Finally, I apply the self-concept view to identify changes that can result in discontinuity of self. (shrink)

Santideva's 8th century Mahayana Buddhist classic, the Guide to the Practices of Awakening (Bodhicaryavatara), has been a source of philosophical inspiration in the Indian and Tibetan traditions for over a thousand years. Stephen Harris guides us through a philosophical exploration of Santideva's masterpiece, introducing us to his understanding of the compassionate bodhisattva, who vows to liberate the entire universe from suffering. Individual chapters provide studies of the bodhisattva virtues of generosity, patience, compassion, and wisdom, illustrating the role each plays in (...) Santideva's account of well-being and moral development. Harris also provides in-depth analysis of many of Santideva's most influential arguments, demonstrating how he employs reasoning as a method to cultivate moral character. (shrink)

Building on the account of a pattern-theory of self introduced by Shaun Gallagher, this article investigates the unique role of the narrative dimension of the self within the self-pattern. According to a pattern-theory, the self is constituted by a cluster of dimensions that interact with each other. A particular variation of this pattern constitutes a self. This article advances the argument that for selves who narrate, the narrative dimension of the self takes a special role that cuts across the other (...) dimensions. First, the pattern-theory of self is introduced and a conceptual and ethical argument for employing a pattern-theory is developed. Second, the distinct role of the narrative dimension of the self is analysed. Through the narrative dimension of the self, we engage in self-definition, integrate and connect the other dimensions of the self, make them intelligible, and ascribe personal meaning to them. And third, the narrator type of self is characterized. Organizing one’s experiences through a self-narrative changes the self. Narrators constitute a unified self, they can actively plan and lead a life and engage in forensic practices, and they integrate the subjective and objective nature of the self. (shrink)

Must we assume that a human being knows all there is to know about its being, its ends and its meaning, this side of death? Is it thinkable that the liturgical beyond overturns the stakes of its being? This paper explores Lacoste's work on de Lubac and connects it with Lacoste's liturgical eschatology and the notion of epektasis in Gregory of Nyssa. Lacoste's thought locates in historically situated human desire an aim beyond the world that intertwines the eschatological with the (...) historical I. (shrink)

Slightly modified reprint of an article first appearing in the journal _Synthesis Philosophica_ (2018).

These ten lectures articulate a distinctive vision of the structure and workings of the human mind, drawing from research on embodied cognition as well as from historically more entrenched approaches to the study of human thought. On the author’s view, multifarious materials co-contribute to the production of virtually all forms of human behavior, rendering implausible the idea that human action is best explained by processes taking place in an autonomous mental arena – those in the conscious mind or occurring at (...) the so-called personal level. Rather, human behavior issues from a widely varied, though nevertheless integrated, collection of states and mechanisms, the integrated nature of which is determined by a form of clustering in the components’ contributions to the production of intelligent behavior. This package of resources, the cognitive system, is the human self. Among its elements, the cognitive system includes a vast number of representations, many subsets of which share their content. On the author’s view, redundancy of content itself constitutes an important explanatory quantity; the greater the extent of content-redundancy among representations that co-contribute to the production of an instance of behavior, the more fluid the behavior. In the course of developing and applying these views, the author addresses questions about the content of mental representations, extended cognition, the value of knowledge, and group minds. (shrink)

In this article, Ellen Bliss Talbot explores the free will/determinism debate through an examination of the notions of individual unity, uniqueness, and self-sufficiency.

Mark Siderits’ Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy is a rich and wide-ranging volume. It is an exercise in what Siderits calls “fusion philosophy,” where the theoretical resources invented by one philosophical tradition are used to solve problems for another. The aim of this book, therefore, is to show how innovations in Buddhist philosophy in Sanskrit can help us make progress in contemporary debates about the nature of persons and personal identity. Here, I think, the book is a success. Not only (...) has it opened up new possibilities within the theoretical space where these debates take place, but also it persuasively explains why these possibilities are worth taking seriously.In a nutshell, the argument of the... (shrink)

This paper explores a distinctive form of social interaction—interpersonal inquiry—in which two or more people attempt to understand one another by engaging in conversation. Like many modes of inquiry into human beings, interpersonal inquiry partly shapes its own objects. How we conduct it thus affects who we become. I present an ethical ideal of conversation to which, I argue, at least some of our interpersonal inquiry ought to aspire. I then consider how this ideal might influence philosophical conceptions of the (...) self. (shrink)

This study investigates eight case reports of spontaneously emerging, brief episodes of vivid altered states of Selfhood (ASoSs) that occurred during mental exercise in six long-term meditators by using a neurophenomenological electroencephalography (EEG) approach. In agreement with the neurophenomenological methodology, first-person reports were used to identify such spontaneous ASoSs and to guide the neural analysis, which involved the estimation of three operational modules of the brain self-referential network (measured by EEG operational synchrony). The result of such analysis demonstrated that the (...) documented ASoSs had unique neurophenomenological profiles, where several aspects or components of Selfhood (measured neurophysiologically and phenomenologically) are affected and expressed differently, but still in agreement with the neurophysiological three-dimensional construct model of the complex experiential Selfhood proposed in our earlier work (Fingelkurts et al. in Conscious Cogn, 2020). (shrink)

Deep Self views of moral responsibility have been criticized for positing mysterious concepts, making nearly paradoxical claims about the ownership of one’s mental states, and promoting self-deceptive moral evasion. I defend Deep Self views from these pervasive forms of skepticism by arguing that some criticism is hasty and stems from epistemic injustice regarding testimonies of experiences of alienation, while other criticism targets contingent features of Deep Self views that ought to be abandoned. To aid in this project, I provide original (...) naturalistic analyses of “Self” and “internality” that replace the view’s metaphorical language with common-sensical concepts that make clear their usefulness. (shrink)

The terms “destiny” and “fate” are often used interchangeably in common parlance. In the course of history, in its relation to morality and religion, fate has sometimes prevailed over destiny as an irrational law or necessity capable of determining the course of events according to an inscrutable order. Scheler— whose philosophy inspired this contribution on authenticity as a fundamental quality of one’s identity—excludes all possible forms of fatalism. In this regard, he phenomenologically distinguishes “destiny” from “individual destination” or “vocation” (individuelle (...) Bestimmung). On his view, it is only by identifying the first with the second, or rather by identifying a set of personal data, traditions, characters, and environments with the specific task that each of us has been called on to carry out in the moral cosmos, that fatalism can arise—where fatalism is linked to the necessity of the world and the absolute impossibility of carving out spheres of human freedom within it. This paper deals precisely with the link between the phenomenon of authenticity and the concept of a person’s vocation. How can we “be” or “become” our authentic selves if we do not know ourselves? If we do not feel what we really love or prefer? If we never feel the breath of freedom? This paper focuses on the role that otherness, understood as effective exemplarity, plays in the formation and moral growth of essential individuality. I will argue, from a Schelerian perspective, that the discovery of the “true” or “ideal” self and the exercise of freedom—as presuppositions of all authentic behavior—do not exclude but rather require the ability to establish meaningful interpersonal relationships. The aim of this work is to offer an axiological, dynamic-relational and embodied model of authenticity. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Chunghyoung Lee argues that, because zygotes are developmentally plastic, they cannot be numerically identical to the singletons into which they develop, thereby undermining conceptionism. In this short paper, I respond to Lee. I argue, first, that, on the most popular theories of personal identity, zygotic plasticity does not undermine conceptionism, and, second, that, even overlooking this first issue, Lee’s plasticity argument is problematic. My goal in all of this is not to take a stand in the (...) abortion debate, which I remain silent on here, but, rather, to push for the conclusion that transitivity fails when we are talking about numerical identity of non-abstract objects. (shrink)

This paper introduces the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna in order to renew interest in it. I show that, in the 1910s and 1920s, she develops ideas and arguments that are also found playing key roles in the development of analytic philosophy decades later. Further, I describe her sympathetic, but acute, criticism of pragmatism and Heideggerian ontology, and situate her work in the tradition of American, speculative philosophy. Before 1920, we will see, de Laguna appeals to multiple realizability to (...) undermine reductionism in science, to support perspectival, scientific realism and, with help from a private language argument, to favour the view that mental states are classified by behavioural, teleological roles over what came to be called ‘type physicalism’. Her view of speech, mostly developed in the 1920s, tells us that its primary role is coordinating group behaviour rather than expressing thoughts. Belief is understood in terms of its causal role, including its causal relations to other kinds of mental states, when coordinating group behaviour. Thought is similarly understood. In developing her theory of mind, de Laguna rejects the pragmatist claims that belief can be reduced to dispositions to behaviour and that thought’s function is to address specific, rather than general, problems. She also favours meaning holism and rejects the analytic–synthetic distinction. In later work, de Laguna argues that individuals’ activity of self-maintenance brings universals, conceived of as irreducible potentialities, into being and makes them increasingly determinate. Further, she identifies the existence of all individuals with forms of self-maintenance and takes the existence of people to include maintenance of the cultural world. Such a unified treatment of existence, she holds, permits making its evolution intelligible. Heidegger’s view of being is rejected for not permitting this. All de Laguna’s work, we will see, fits a vision of philosophy as the systematic, imaginative and naturalistic examination of being as well as a source of criticism of science. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi 莊子 depicts persons as surviving their deaths through the natural transformations of the world into very different forms—such as roosters, cart-wheels, rat livers, and so on. It is common to interpret these passages metaphorically. In this essay, however, I suggest employing a “Conventionalist” view of persons that says whether a person survives some event is not merely determined by the world, but is partly determined by our own attitudes. On this reading, Zhuangzi’s many teachings urging us to embrace (...) transformation are not merely a psychological aid for dealing with death, but also serve as a tool for literally surviving it. (shrink)