Anthony Rudd presents a striking new account of the self as an ethical, evaluative being.

It is widely thought that sceptical arguments, if correct, would show that everyday empirical knowledge‐claims are false. Against this, I argue that the very generality of traditional sceptical arguments means that there is no direct incompatibility between everyday empirical claims and sceptical scenarios. Scepticism calls into doubt, not ordinary empirical beliefs, but philosophical attempts to give a deep ontological explanation of such beliefs. G. E. Moore's attempt to refute scepticism (and idealism) was unsuccessful, because it failed to recognise that philosophical (...) scepticism operates on a different level from that on which we make – or doubt – particular empirical claims. And, as I argue with specific reference to work by Nozick and Fogelin, Moore’s basic confusion is still widely shared in contemporary discussions of scepticism. (shrink)

This book is a discussion of some of Kierkegaard's central ideas, showing their relevance to contemporary debates in epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Anthony Rudd's aim is not simply to expound Kierkegaard's ideas but to draw on them creatively in order to illuminate questions about the foundations of morality and the nature of personal identity, as discussed by analytical philosophers such as MacIntyre, Parfit, Williams, and Foot. Rudd seeks a way forward from the sterile conflict (...) between the view that morality and religion are based on objective reasoning and the view that they are merely expressions of subjective emotions. He argues that morality and religion must be understood in terms of the individual's search for a sense of meaning in his or her own life, but emphasizes that this does not imply that values are arbitrary or merely subjective. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, a number of influential philosophers, psychologists and others have invoked the notion of narrative as having a central role to play in our thinking about ethics and personal identity.1 It has been argued that our sense of self is bound up with our capacity to tell a coherent story about ourselves, and that the mainstream analytic debate on personal identity has reached an impasse because the parties to it abstract the notion of a person from (...) the narratives in which persons figure as characters. It has also been argued, ethically, that we should strive to achieve the kind of unity characteristic of a narrative in our lives. However, something of a backlash against these narrative theories now seems to be developing, exemplified in recent work by, for instance, Galen Strawson, Peter Lamarque and John Christman.2 My intention here is to defend the value of the narrative approach from some of the most common recent criticisms. It would perhaps be better, though, to say ”a’, rather than ”the’, narrative approach; thinkers as different as Dennett and MacIntyre have both insisted on the importance of narrative, but the substantive claims that they make for it are very different.3 What I shall be defending is an approach to personal identity and ethics, drawn mainly from MacIntyre and Taylor, in which narrative plays a central role. In §1, I will elucidate the concept of narrative that MacIntyre introduced in After Virtue and show why this is central to thinking about the identity of persons across time. In §2, I shall consider and reject various objections to this narrative account of personal identity. I hope to show that some of the prominent criticisms of narrative theory simply don’t apply to this conception, properly understood. However, I don’t want to claim that the dispute over narrative is based purely on misunderstanding. One centrally important aspect of the dispute is a first-order ethical one about the extent to which we should seek for a unity based on narrative coherence in our lives, and in §§3 and 4, I will offer a defence of Taylor’s claim that an ethical life must aspire to, and to some extent achieve, narrative unity. (shrink)

This thoughtful book argues that skepticism -- the view that reliable knowledge is beyond our grasp -- is unavoidable unless knowledge is thought of not as merely an intellectual matter but as crucial to practical activity and emotional life. Author Anthony Rudd ties this idea to the work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, exploring important similarities between the former's reminders of the "expressive" character of human experience and the latter's account of ways to experience the physical world "expressively.".

Over the last few decades, a number of influential philosophers, psychologists and others have invoked the notion of narrative as having a central role to play in our thinking about ethics and personal identity. More recently, a backlash against these narrative theories has developed, exemplified in work by, for instance, Galen Strawson, Peter Lamarque and John Christman. This paper defends an approach to personal identity and ethics, influenced mainly by Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, in which narrative plays a central (...) (though not a foundational) role. In sec I, I elucidate the concept of narrative that MacIntyre introduced in After Virtue and show why this is central to thinking about the identity of persons across time. In sec II, I consider and reject various objections to this narrative account of personal identity. I hope to show that some of the prominent criticisms of narrative theory simply don’t apply to this conception, properly understood. However, I don’t want to claim that the dispute over narrative is based purely on misunderstanding, One centrally important aspect of the dispute is a first-order ethical one about the extent to which we should seek for a unity based on narrative coherence in our lives, and in secs III and IV, I will offer a defence of Taylor’s claim that an ethical life must aspire to, and to some extent achieve, narrative unity. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, John Lippitt mounts a forceful argument against narrativist approaches to issues in personal identity and practical deliberation, with specific reference to the application of such approaches in the interpretation of Kierkegaard's writings. The present critical discussion piece addresses two points in Lippitt's argument. First, it seeks to meet Lippitt's challenge to clarify the notion of "a whole life" as this figures in narrativist positions. Second, it clarifies the sense in which narrative unity, and (...) even selfhood, may be a matter of degree. It then uses this latter insight to sketch a defense of the claim that narrativity may indeed play a crucial role in Kierkegaard's distinction between ethical and aesthetic ways of life. (shrink)

This paper starts from the debate between proponents of a neo-Lockean psychological continuity view of personal identity, and defenders of the idea that we are simple mental substances. Each party has valid criticisms of the other; the impasse in the debate is traced to the Lockean assumption that substance is only externally related to its attributes. This suggests the possibility that we could develop a better account of mental substance if we thought of it as having an internal relation to (...) its states. I suggest that we may be able to do this by relying on the notion of expression. In developing this idea I draw heavily on aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophical psychology, while also developing and criticizing Strawson's account of persons and recent work by Lynne Baker. I conclude by arguing that mental substance, understood in this way, can only be grasped in narrative terms; substantialist and narrative accounts of personal identity, far from being opposed, are mutually supporting and require one another to be coherent. (shrink)

The 1990s saw a revival of interest in Kierkegaard's thought, affecting the fields of theology, social theory, and literary and cultural criticism. The resulting discussions have done much to discredit the earlier misreadings of Kierkegaard's works.

This paper examines Kierkegaard 's discussion of patience in some of his Upbuilding Discourses, and its connection with his understanding of the nature of selfhood as it appears both in the Discourses and in The Sickness unto Death. That understanding stresses that selfhood is not simply given, but is a task to be achieved—although a task that can only be achieved by the self that is formed in the process of undertaking it. For Kierkegaard, an account of the self that (...) recognizes its essential temporality must give a crucial role to patience as a virtue necessary for the formation and maintenance of personal identity. However, although the self is essentially temporal for Kierkegaard, it is also essentially such as to participate in eternity, and this complexity and tension in his concept of the self gives his understanding of patience a particular character—one that presents an important challenge to some of the dominant assumptions of recent and contemporary philosophy in both the analytic and the continental traditions. (shrink)

It is often argued that the existence of qualia -- private mental objects -- shows that physicalism is false. In this paper, I argue that to think in terms of qualia is a misleading way to develop what is in itself a valid intuition about the inability of physicalism to do justice to our conscious experience. I consider arguments by Dennett and Wittgenstein which indicate what is wrong with the notion of qualia, but which by so doing, help us to (...) locate the real problem for physicalism. This is not that there may be mental as well as physical objects of which we are aware, but that the very notion of awareness is itself resistant to physicalist treatment. In the concluding sections, I draw on Wittgenstein's positive account of sensations, to suggest a way in which the apparent chasm separating objective and subjective viewpoints might be bridged in a non-reductive fashion. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 412-430, June 2021.

This book contains a vigorous argument, constructed with the help of Kierkegaard, that the Kantian ideal of autonomy in ethics is misplaced, and that the most adequate forms of the ethical life see ethics as requiring a religious foundation. The ideal of an ethic that is grounded in "pure, impartial reason" is a chimera; no justification for ethical living can be given that does not see ethical knowledge as stemming from a "committed" or "situated" perspective that eschews the disengaged "view (...) from nowhere." The ideal of disengagement, when universalized, produces skepticism in epistemology and amoralism in ethics. Since this ideal is itself a type of ethical stance, Rudd agrees with Kierkegaard that it cannot be "objectively" refuted, but can and must be rejected. In exploring Kierkegaard’s epistemology, Rudd correctly sees that this Kierkegaardian emphasis on "subjectivity" as necessary for knowledge by no means implies any kind of relativism or subjectivism about truth. (shrink)

This paper defends and develops an argument against epiphenomenalism, broadly construed. I argue first for a definition of epiphenomenalism which includes ‘non-reductive’ materialism as well as classical dualistic epiphenomenalism. I then present an argument that if epiphenomenalism were true it would be impossible to know about or even refer to our conscious states -- and therefore impossible even to formulate epiphenomenalism. David Chalmers has defended epiphenomenalism against such arguments; I consider this defence and attempt to show that it fails. I (...) conclude that an adequate account of mental causation requires us to abandon the principle of the causal closure of the physical, and attempt to rebut charges that it would be ‘unscientific’ to do so. (shrink)

A contrast is drawn between two types of externalism, one based on ideas of Wittgenstein, the other on arguments from Putnam. Gregory McCulloch’s attempt to combine the two types is then examined and criticized. Putnamian externalism is ambiguous. It can be interpreted either as the empirical claim that we give priority to scientific as opposed to other forms of discourse, or as a metaphysical claim that our language attempts to conform to the structure of the world ‘in itself’. But the (...) first claim is simply false, and the second involves a form of metaphysical realism that a Wittgensteinian must reject as unintelligible. McCulloch’s attempted synthesis of the two types is therefore either incoherent, or else simply adds an empirical falsehood to Wittgenstein’s conceptual point. It is also noted that Putnam himself has progressively retreated from his original claims, and now appears to be a Wittgensteinian, but not a ‘Putnamian’, externalist. (shrink)

The question of the value of painting—why paintings should matter to us—has been addressed by a number of Phenomenological philosophers. In this paper, I critically review recent discussions of this topic by Simon Crowell and Paul Crowther—while also looking back to work by Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry. All the views I discuss claim that painting is important because it can make manifest certain philosophically important truths. While sympathetic to this approach, I discuss various problems with it. Firstly, are these truths (...) verbally explicable, or only communicable through the artwork itself? Secondly, if its truthfulness is the reason why we value painting, can this criterion track our intuitive judgements about relative artistic merit? Thirdly, can the truthfulness of painting be a reason for valuing it if that truth is divorced from its traditional association with Beauty and Goodness? I suggest ways in which the first and second problems could in principle be solved, but argue in response to the third that truth must indeed be seen in the context of other values if it is to explain why painting matters. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the traditional mind-body problem, which seems intractable in its own terms, could be helpfully reconfigured by drawing on insights from the Phenomenological tradition concerning the “body-subject” or “lived body.” Rather than attempting to explain how consciousness relates to the body as understood by the natural sciences, the Phenomenologists concentrate on elucidating the first-person sense that we have of our own bodies in ordinary, prescientific existence. After surveying the traditional mind-body problem in section 1, I (...) introduce the Phenomenological account of embodied subjectivity in section 2. In the remainder of the essay I discuss two important issues raised by this account. First, in section 3, I consider how we can relate our everyday sense of ourselves as embodied subjects to the scientific understanding of the human body—what we might call the “body-body problem.” I argue that, in any case, the latter understanding cannot coherently be supposed to undermine or debunk the former. Secondly, in section 4, I consider whether the Phenomenological stress on the bodily nature of subjectivity allows any room for the notion of disembodied existence. (shrink)

Many philosophers now argue that the doubts of the philosophical sceptic are unnatural ones, in that they are not forced on us by considerations that any reasonable person would have to accept as compelling but only arise if one has already accepted certain controversial theoretical commitments. In this article I defend the naturalness of philosophical scepticism against such criticisms. After defining "global ontological scepticism," I examine the work of a number of anti-sceptical philosophers—Michael Huemer, Michael Williams, and John McDowell. Although (...) McDowell does move the debate to a deeper level by interpreting scepticism as a challenge to the very possibility of the mind's apprehending reality by being in a rational rather than a merely causal relation to it, none of them succeeds in showing that global ontological scepticism is, in the relevant sense, unnatural. This is not to say that the sceptic is correct; simply that it has not been shown that we can reasonably dismiss the sceptical questions and thereby evade the need to engage seriously with the sceptical arguments. (shrink)

Many philosophers now argue that the doubts of the philosophical sceptic are unnatural ones, in that they are not forced on us by considerations that any reasonable person would have to accept as compelling but only arise if one has already accepted certain controversial theoretical commitments. In this article I defend the naturalness of philosophical scepticism against such criticisms. After defining “global ontological scepticism,” I examine the work of a number of anti‐sceptical philosophers—Michael Huemer, Michael Williams, and John McDowell. Although (...) McDowell does move the debate to a deeper level by interpreting scepticism as a challenge to the very possibility of the mind's apprehending reality by being in a rational rather than a merely causal relation to it, none of them succeeds in showing that global ontological scepticism is, in the relevant sense, unnatural. This is not to say that the sceptic is correct; simply that it has not been shown that we can reasonably dismiss the sceptical questions and thereby evade the need to engage seriously with the sceptical arguments. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the philosophy of painting, though widely influential and much discussed, remain enigmatic. In this paper I compare his views on painting with those of his older contemporary, Jacques Maritain, who also holds that painting can give us a non-conceptual insight into deep truths about things that are inaccessible to discursive thought. I argue that some ideas that are obscure and undeveloped in Merleau-Ponty are developed more clearly and fully in Maritain. Even where there are significant differences between (...) them, these are not as great as it might at first seem. This comparison can help us to see the ways in which both philosophers’ theories of art are important for understanding their philosophies as a whole. Furthermore, the views they hold in common can continue to suggest a plausible and fruitful way to think about art today. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the philosophy of painting, though widely influential and much discussed, remain enigmatic. In this paper I compare his views on painting with those of his older contemporary, Jacques Maritain, who also holds that painting can give us a non-conceptual insight into deep truths about things that are inaccessible to discursive thought. I argue that some ideas that are obscure and undeveloped in Merleau-Ponty are developed more clearly and fully in Maritain. Even where there are significant differences between (...) them, these are not as great as it might at first seem. This comparison can help us to see the ways in which both philosophers’ theories of art are important for understanding their philosophies as a whole. Furthermore, the views they hold in common can continue to suggest a plausible and fruitful way to think about art today. (shrink)

This paper responds to Dan Hutto’s paper, ‘Narrative Self-Shaping: a Modest Proposal’. Hutto there attacks the “strong” narrativism defended in my recent book, ‘Self, Value and Narrative’ and in recent work by Marya Schechtman. I rebut Hutto’s argument that non-narrative forms of evaluative self-shaping can plausibly be conceived, and defend the notion of implicit narrative against his criticisms. I conclude by briefly indicating some difficulties that arise for the “modest” form of narrativism that Hutto defends.

Stanley Cavell has suggested that the deepest roots of skepticism lie in a sense of alienation between the subject and the world, and this has led him to reassess the philosophical importance of the Romantic project of “re-enchanting” the world. One way to pursue this project is by starting from Kant’s reflections on the sublime. I consider Julian Young’s recent discussion of this topic and the Heideggeran pantheism to which it leads him. I conclude that, while there is much insight (...) in Young’s reflections, there are crucial weaknesses in his position that point towards the plausibility of re-configuring it in more theistic and / or Platonic terms. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 1 Seiten: 475-494.