The Caterpillar’s Question: Contesting Anti-Humanism’s Contestations

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27 (2&3):243–263 (1997)
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Abstract

The caterpillar’s question is the question Wonderland’s caterpillar posed to Alice: Who are you? This is a question Alice finds she cannot answer. According to postmodernist anti-humanism, Alice cannot answer the question because there is no coherent Alice there to answer it, no unitary subject of consciousness.This paper contests the anti-humanist denial of a coherent subject of experience. While it is conceded that phenomenologically, we may have difficulty today identifying who we are essentially, it is argued that, conceptually, we cannot do without the ontological category of the person as a unified center of consciousness

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Douglas Porpora
Drexel University

Citations of this work

The Relational Subject.Douglas V. Porpora - 2016 - Journal of Critical Realism 15 (4):419-425.
Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach.Margaret S. Archer - 2015 - Journal of Critical Realism 15 (4):425-431.

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