In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize themselves (...) in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity.Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians”can do their part in bringing about a just society. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this commentary I evaluate what McGowan’s project would conclude with respect to the treatment of professional Australian Football League player Adam Goodes, who was incessantly ‘booed’ by crowds for the final two years of his career. Analysing Goodes’ case in light of McGowan’s argument leads me to two observations. First, McGowan’s norm-enactment approach is incredibly useful because it explains how words like ‘boo’ (with unstable meaning) can constitute actionable discrimination. Second, however, I wonder if a narrow focus on (...) whether such speech is legally actionable might encourage an overestimation of the power of laws to shepherd new g-norms into social practices. (shrink)

This study investigates the three major educational philosophies behind the medical humanities programs in the United States. It summarizes the characteristics of the Cultural Transmission Approach, the Affective Developmental Approach, and the Cognitive Developmental Approach. A questionnaire was sent to 415 teachers of medical humanities asking for their perceptions of the amount of time and effort devoted by their programs to these three philosophical approaches. The 234 responses constituted a 54.6% return. The approximately 80:20 gender ratio of males to females (...) and other demographic data on age and educational background were consistent with other studies of the field of medical humanities.Reflections on the results in Table II indicate that some changes need to take place in the teaching of the medical humanities if the perceived ideal is to be achieved. In order for the current teachers of the medical humanities to think that the appropriate philosophies behind the teaching of the medical humanities are being implemented as they should be, much less time and effort need to be devoted to the Cultural Transmission Approach. With no other published reports on the educational philosophies behind the medical humanities programs, this study created a new knowledge base about this relatively young and rapidly emerging field. (shrink)

Agency and identity -- Necessitation -- Acts and actions -- Aristotle and Kant -- Agency and practical identity -- The metaphysics of normativity -- Constitutive standards -- The constitution of life -- In defense of teleology -- The paradox of self-constitution -- Formal and substantive principles of reason -- Formal versus substantive -- Testing versus weighing -- Maximizing and prudence -- Practical reason and the unity of the will -- The empiricist account of normativity -- The rationalist (...) account of normativity -- Kant on the hypothetical imperative -- Against particularistic willing -- Deciding and predicting -- Autonomy and efficacy -- The function of action -- The possibility of agency -- Non-rational action -- Action -- Attribution -- The psychology of action -- Expulsion from the garden : the transition to humanity -- Instinct, emotion, intelligence, and reason -- The parts of the soul -- Inside or outside -- Pull yourself together -- The constitutional model -- Models of the soul -- The city and the soul -- Platonic virtues -- Justice : substantive, procedural, and platonic -- Kant and the constitutional model -- Defective action -- The problem of bad action -- Being governed by the wrong law -- Or five bad constitutions -- Conceptions of evil -- Degrees of action -- Integrity and interaction -- Deciding to be bad -- The ordinary cases -- Dealing with the disunified -- Kant's theory of interaction -- My reasons -- Deciding to treat someone as an end in himself -- Interacting with yourself -- How to be a person -- What's left of me? (shrink)

All people are vulnerable to having their self-concepts shaped by others. This article investigates that vulnerability using a theory of narrative self-constitution. According to narrative self-constitution, people depend on others to develop and maintain skills of self-narration and they are vulnerable to having the content of their self-narratives co-authored by others. This theoretical framework highlights how vulnerability to co-authoring is essential to developing a self-narrative and, thus, the possibility of autonomy. However, this (...) vulnerability equally entails that co-authors can undermine autonomy by contributing disvalued content to the agent’s self-narrative and undermining her authorial skills. I illustrate these processes with the first-hand reports of several women who survived sexual abuse as children. Their narratives of survival and healing reveal the challenges involved in developing the skills required to manage vulnerability to co-authoring and how others can help in this process. Finally, I discuss some of the implications of co-authoring for the healthcare professional and the therapeutic relationship. (shrink)

Plato and Kant advance a constitutional model of the soul, in which reason and appetite or passion have different structural and functional roles in the generation of motivation, as opposed to the familiar Combat Model in which they are portrayed as independent sources of motivation struggling for control. In terms of the constitutional model we may explain what makes an action different from an event. What makes an action attributable to a person, and therefore what makes it an action, is (...) that it issues from the person''s constitution, and therefore from the person as a whole, rather than from some force working on or in the person. This in turn implies an account of what makes an action good: what makes an action good is that it is deliberated upon and chosen in a way that unifies the person into a constitutional system. Through deliberative action we constitute ourselves as unified agents. Platonic justice and Kant''s categorical imperative are shown to be normative standards for action because they are principles of self-constitution. (shrink)

Why do some addicted people chronically fail in their goal to recover, while others succeed? On one established view, recovery depends, in part, on efforts of intentional planning agency. This seems right, however, firsthand accounts of addiction suggest that the agent’s self-narrative also has an influence. This paper presents arguments for the view that self-narratives have independent, self-fulfilling momentum that can support or undermine self-governance. The self-narrative structures of addicted persons can entrench addiction and alienate (...) the agent from practically feasible recovery plans. Strategic re-narration can redirect narrative momentum and therefore support recovery in ways that intentional planning alone cannot. (shrink)

Narrative views of the self argue that we constitute our self in self-narratives. Embodied views hold that our self is shaped through embodied experiences. In that case, what is the relation between embodiment and narrativity in the process of self-constitution? The question demands a clear definition of embodiment, but existing studies remains unclear on this point (section 2). We offer a correction to this situation by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body that highlights (...) its habituality. On this account, the body has an inherent tendency to cultivate an organization of habits through its history of engagement with the world (section 3). Next, we explore its role in narrative self-constitution by distinguishing between two aspects of the narrative self, the narrated I and the narrating I (section 4). We argue on phenomenological grounds that self-narratives are informed by bodily perspectives in both respects. Furthermore, a focus on the habituality of the body allows for a better explanation of self-constitution than those based on implicit self-narratives (section 5). For these phenomenological and theoretical reasons, we conclude that narrative self-constitution is an embodied and embedded practice (section 6). (shrink)

My dissertation, “Love, Self-Constitution, and Practical Necessity,” offers an interpretation of love between people. Love is puzzling because it appears to involve essentially both rational and non-rational phenomena. We are accountable to those we love, so love seems to participate in forms of necessity, commitment, and expectation, which are associated with morality. But non-rational attitudes—forms of desire, attraction, and feeling—are also central to love. Consequently, love is not obviously based in rationality or inclination. In contrast to views that (...) attempt to fit love into existing models of practical reasoning, I argue that love participates in a unique form of practical necessity, different from both moral and psychological necessity, yet bearing resemblances to each. Distinctive to this type of practical necessity is a direct appeal to another particular person that cannot be delivered in third-personal terms—that is, a non-moral yet normative type of expectation on another person. This type of expectation is predominant in loving relationships, but can also make better sense of the experiences of humor and beauty, as well as attitudes like forgiveness, gratitude, and agent-regret. I treat Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the experience of beauty in the Critique of Judgment and Christine Korsgaard’s work on self-constitution as fruitful starting points for this account of love. I conclude that our loving relationships enable us to have distinctive personal selves, and provide support for this account of love by offering a complementary theory of grief. In Part One of the dissertation, I focus on two prominent approaches to love characteristic of the sentimentalist and rationalist traditions. I begin with the work of David Hume, which treats desire (understood as something like a simple impulse or craving) as the paradigmatic mental state, and emphasizes our personal and affective dimensions. Hume has the valuable insight that loving someone affects our sense of ourselves. But Hume’s view becomes unsatisfying when he claims that love is essentially enfeebling, implying that to love is to be passive toward and readily overcome by another person. While this indicates Hume’s awareness that love involves being open and receptive to another person, the problem is that love is also a demanding attitude. Hume lacks the conceptual resources to offer a nuanced view of the self, in which we can—with one attitude—be both demanding of and vulnerable to another person. Hume’s model of a desire-based deliberative process has recently been revived in Harry Frankfurt’s discussions on love and rationality. Frankfurt, however, goes beyond Hume’s picture of the self by introducing a notion of “identification,” which he offers to make sense of our apparent ability to commit ourselves decisively to certain projects or people. I argue that active powers like identification and commitment cannot be accommodated within any basically Humean moral psychology. Such abilities, and with them the possibility of love, depend on something closer to a Kantian conception of rational agency. I next focus on the work of Kant, who provides the substantial counterpart to Humean-inspired moral theories, but is not known for his insight into our emotional lives. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant divides love into “practical love”—what we experience when we are morally motivated to help someone—and “pathological love”—what we experience when we feel fond of something. But in reality, we experience love neither as a mere preference for another person, nor as something that generates the kind of demands that would be binding on any rational creature. David Velleman attempts to remedy the deficiency of Kant’s dichotomy. Velleman offers a Kantian theory in which he describes love and respect as two ends of a continuum of attitudes that it is morally appropriate to have toward people. Velleman’s view has the peculiar implication that everyone deserves the love of everyone else, and I argue that this is a fatal flaw. Like Kant and Velleman, Korsgaard characterizes personal love as involving the treatment of other people as Kantian ends-in-themselves to a heightened degree. Korsgaard, though, also contends that our individual identities depend upon our personal relationships, and I take this position seriously for the remainder of the dissertation. Ultimately, however, characterizations of loving relations as subsets of moral relations can account for the authority of the demands of love, but not its particularity. The major conclusion of Part One is that any attempt to understand love primarily on a model of practical reasoning with which we are already familiar is doomed to fail. Our experience of love calls for a theory of a unique type of practical necessity. In Part Two I take seriously the possibility that love is simultaneously inescapable (in something like the way morality is supposed to be), and yet ineluctably personal. In love, we experience an engagement with a person as essentially particular, rather than as an instance of a rational agent in general. To make sense of this direct attachment to an individual, I argue that love involves distinctive forms of expectation and disappointment. When those we love let us down, they hurt our feelings, which is not a response to a failed prediction, but nor is it a reaction to a moral insult or offense. According to Peter Strawson and Stephen Darwall, second-personal moral reactive attitudes (such as resentment) always have third-personal analogues (such as indignation). In contrast, I argue that the type of hurt feelings associated with love is a second-personal reactive attitude that does not have a third-personal corollary. I take this as evidence that the expectations involved in love are not objective in the way that the moral is objective. Nor, however, is love a matter of mere preference. On my interpretation, Kant introduces this different type of expectation in the Critique of Judgment. Whereas he characterizes moral judgments as universally communicable, judgments of beauty implicitly involve only second-personal address: I appeal to your direct experience with a particular object. This provides the conceptual space for an account of love according to which it involves a uniquely second-personal form of practical necessity. I contend that the second-personal addresses we make in love are appeals to strengthen the intimacy implicit in the loving relationship, and I identify three interrelated dimensions of that intimacy. First, those we love have the standing to interpret us in a constitutive manner. We fine-tune and make determinate the character of our concerns and interests in part by accepting the interpretations provided by those we love. In that way, the people we love have the normative power to constitute who we are. Second, we share a perspective with those we love in a way that is not reducible to or derivative of our independent perspectives. Loving someone centrally involves the activity of forming concerns together, and we do this in a mode best understood on the model of playing a spontaneous game or improvising music. Finally, being loved enables us to see ourselves as distinctive and special, because the concern those who love us have for us does not track the objective merit of our characteristics. These dimensions of the intimacy that characterizes a loving relationship reveal what it is that we appeal for in love, and how we are hurt when our appeals are rebuffed. In broad terms, this dissertation advocates the recognition of a non-moral yet normative type of expectation, which is predominant in loving relationships. Humor and beauty, too, make more sense when understood in terms of this non-moral yet normative type of expectation, as they involve appeals to others that are more than mere predictions of, but less than rational demands for, a certain kind of response. Introducing this alternative notion of expectation into the discourse of moral philosophy can shed light on other common attitudes that are clearly normative, but defy translation into objective, third-personal terms. Such attitudes include certain experiences of pride and shame, apology and forgiveness, the bestowing of mercy, gratitude, agent-regret, and perhaps a basic sense of trust we have in others. Ultimately, I situate love in respect to grief, which demonstrates my theory’s ability to make sense of related dimensions of our emotional lives. The people we love and grieve over give us a sense of who we are as distinctive, particular individuals, as the three interrelated dimensions of intimacy in loving relationships reveal. Consequently, grief is best understood as a type of practical disorientation—namely, a disorientation that involves the loss of the personal self. I present my account of grief against the type of account that would draw philosophical conclusions about the nature of love and grief from empirical psychological data alone. In particular, these data indicate that we recover quickly from the deaths of loved ones, and Dan Moller draws the philosophical conclusion that those we love fulfill certain roles in our lives and are replaceable. In contrast, I contend that while we should acknowledge the truth of the objective judgment, made in the third-person, that we will likely recover after the deaths of those we love, it does not follow that we must affirm such a claim from the internal perspective of one person who loves another. As a result, the case of love and grief supports a general claim concerning the proper work of moral philosophy, which is that the understanding of ourselves gained through empirical data is not a substitute for the normative conclusions that are revealed through first-personal reflections on our relationships. (shrink)

This article begins by asking whether boundaries can be assigned to discourse analysis. It suggests making a distinction between `discourse linguistics' and `discourse analysis', which has a specific viewpoint on discourse. It propounds next to open to research the field of `self-constituting discourses', thus bringing together those discourses that legitimate the whole discursive production, such as philosophical, scientific or religious discourses. Lastly the article emphasizes some characteristics of such discourses and presents concepts that are useful in analysing them - (...) particularly `scenography', `linguistic code', and `ethos', and offers illustrative examples. (shrink)

This paper argues for interpreting Nietzsche along the lines of a self-constitution view. According to the self-constitution view, a person is a kind of creation: we constitute our selves throughout our lives. The self-constitution view may take more than one form: on the narrative version, the self is like a story, while on the Kantian version, the self is a set of principles or commitments. Taking Marya Schechtman’s and Christine Korsgaard’s accounts as (...) paradigmatic, I take the self-constitution view to emphasize practical considerations and the first person point of view and to conceive of the self as active in self-creation. The interpretation I offer can make sense of Nietzsche’s remarks about self-creation and of many of Nietzsche’s remarks about the self that would otherwise seem contradictory. In particular, Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical remarks about the self fit well with the self-constitution view as long as they are understood as theoretical claims that do not undermine the importance of the practical point of view. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es analizar la noción de subjetivación, clave en el último Foucault, a la luz de la metáfora barroca del _pliegue_. Según Deleuze, hay dos fuentes distintas, la memoria del Ser de Heidegger y la monadología de Leibniz, que se reúnen en cierto sentido en esta noción foucaultiana. A este respecto, pretendo destacar la importancia del concepto de subjetivación en el contexto de un giro performativo en la filosofía contemporánea, así como diversas formas históricas de entender (...) este concepto. Un aspecto técnico, pero crucial, que hay que subrayar es la compleja interacción y la mutua co-dependencia entre la subjetivación activa y la sujeción (_assujettissement_). La comprensión del «modo de la sujeción» en Foucault como uno de los «cuatro pliegues de la subjetivación» proporciona un argumento convincente para el pluralismo ético. Por último, esta perspectiva brinda una importante clave para revisar la interpretación de Deleuze de Foucault. Pues es la memoria violenta de Nietzsche, y no la memoria heideggeriana del Ser, la que se revela como decisiva en el proceso de subjetivación, y también como una vía de conversión necesaria de la libertad «negativa» en libertad positiva en el sentido de la autonomía y autodisciplina, en concordancia con el proyecto nietzscheano de hacer que el «ascetismo vuelva a ser natural». (shrink)

In “Mad Narratives: Self-Constitutions Through the Diagnostic Looking Glass,” by using narrative approaches to the self, I explore how the diagnosis of mental disorder shapes personal identities and influences flourishing. My particular focus is the diagnosis grounded on the criteria provided by the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). I develop two connected accounts pertaining to the self and mental disorder. I use the memoirs and personal stories written by the subjects with a DSM diagnosis as (...) illustrations to bolster my claims. First, expanding on the narrative approaches to the self, I explain how narratives about a subject shape her self-constitution. I elucidate how this process is generated by drawing on research in developmental psychology, cognitive science, and social psychology. Next, using this account as a springboard, I argue that the DSM diagnosis of mental disorder serves as a source of narrative, entering into the patients’ autobiographical and social narratives. This plays an important role in the diagnosed subjects’ self-understanding, self-constitution and flourishing. In this vein, how mental disorders are classified is not only a theoretical question about accurately taxonomizing the various experiences related to mental distress but also an ethical question about which ways of talking about mental disorders will allow subjects to respond effectively to their psychological distress, to flourish and to live autonomous and fulfilling lives. Finally, I suggest that the DSM-based narratives wield a double-edged sword when it comes to the subject’s flourishing: On the one hand, there are problems with some DSM-based narratives that stem from the DSM diagnostic schema and the culture of DSM diagnoses. These problems render these DSM-based narratives unbeneficial for flourishing as they constrain the range of adoptive social, cognitive and emotional responses the subjects can give to their mental disorders. On the other hand, there are grounds to believe that some DSM-based narratives help subjects to flourish. For instance, they provide certainty to subjects' otherwise puzzling symptoms and help them reach out to others with similar experiences. Understanding how the DSM-based narratives can both benefit and harm will help us address problems with psychiatric diagnoses and the dissemination of knowledge about mental disorders in popular culture. The project aims to convince both philosophers and psychiatrists that no plausible theory of the self can be developed without attending to the topic of mental disorder and that no theory of mental disorder can be complete without devising the tools provided by the philosophical approaches to the self as well as developmental and social psychology. It also calls for methodological alterations in mental health ethics research, arguing that a careful scrutiny of mental disorder memoirs can advance the ethical underpinnings to the practice of psychiatry. (shrink)

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 89, Issue 3, Page 549-556, September 2011.

In his commentary on Plato's Parmenides, Proclus critiques an unnamed predecessor for attributing self-constitution to the One, claiming that the notion necessitates duality in its subject. Proclus almost certainly has in mind Plotinus in Ennead VI.8.13-22, where the latter attributes self-causation and determination to the One. However in the latter context, Plotinus is rather attempting to show how the One's unity entails that it is the cause of such self-determinative activity manifested in Intellect (as in the (...) earlier Enn. VI.8.1-7). One could conclude, as does John Dillon, that Proclus is giving up an unfair criticism of Plotinus. In this dissertation I offer some support for Proclus' critical stance with an analysis of both figures' positions, starting with a look at (1) self-constitution and its conceptual origin in self-motion; (2) Plotinus on the One's causality; (3) Proclus on the One's causality; and (4) an analysis of Enn. VI.8.13-14 in light of Proclus' critique. While it could be that Proclus takes little account for Plotinus' careful construction in the language of Enn. VI.8.13-22, still Proclus' critique hinges on a different view of causation for the One than Plotinus'. The different stance lies in the background for why Plotinus allows for self-constitution in the One, even if with metaphorical language, while for Proclus such language pertains only to the intermediate level below the One (with e.g. Being, between the One and Intellect) and not up to the One-itself. (shrink)

This article argues that Christine Korsgaard gives two accounts of maxims, the identity-priority account and the form-priority account. There is a tension between the accounts because Korsgaard's form-priority maxims account cannot function apart from the identity of a well-formed agent that precedes and tests maxims to determine if they should count as reasons or laws, and Korsgaard's identity-priority maxims account needs the form of the maxim to precede, bind, and constitute the well-formed agent. This tension mirrors the two sides of (...) what Korsgaard has called the “paradox of self-constitution.” The article concludes that Korsgaard's paradox of self-constitution leads to an arbitrariness that undermines the formation of moral laws. (shrink)

Sôphrosunê ("self-discipline") is the often-forgotten sibling of justice, wisdom, courage, and piety in discussions of canonical Greek virtues. Christopher Moore shows that during the classical period it was the object of significant debate--about its scope, its feel, its practical manifestations, and its value. By interpreting sôphrosunê as a commitment to norm-following, we see that these pointed discussions of the virtue, previously ignored as parodic moralizing or expressions of political propaganda, are in fact concerned with the ideal of human agency. (...) These discussions query the way we become fully responsible for our actions. Greek thinking about sôphrosunê becomes thinking about self-constitution, our crucial capacity to act on the general reasons that we come to identify with as our own. This perspective explains sôphrosunê's inclusion in Plato's canon of virtues, and before that its frequent appearance in funerary inscriptions, elegiac poetry, tragic drama, and historiography. It also explains the analytic attention given to it by Heraclitus, the Sophists, the historians, Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato. Moore deals principally with the classical period, though the book includes one chapter addressing earlier poetry and another addressing the virtue in two gender-sensitive post-classical works. An appendix deals with the epigraphic material. For the Greeks (and perhaps for us) there is a virtue of agency, an acquirable capacity to be guided by what's best. Hardly just a concern for reticence and reserve, commitment to sôphrosunê is a commitment to whatever it is that makes us truly ourselves. (shrink)

This book extends the contemporary concept of the minimal self by introducing the affective core self. The overall aim is to integrate certain psychoanalytical ideas into the phenomenological investigation of passivity and reformulate the idea of the phenomenological unconscious. This volume contributes to the multidimensional analysis of the self by positioning the affective core self between the layers of the more minimal and the less minimal self. It underscores the importance of the unconscious in the (...) constitution of the affective core self by providing the comparative analysis of the phenomenological and the psychoanalytical unconscious. Furthermore, comparisons are drawn between Freud’s conception of the afterwardsness of trauma and the phenomenological notion of retroactive sense-constitution. The book concludes that retroactive sense-making is a double-sided phenomenon and differentiates between implicit-bodily and conscious-narrative retroactive sense-constitution. In order to bolster the idea of implicit-bodily sense-constitution the volume also examines and utilizes contemporary insights on the nature of body memory. The conclusion claims that the affective core self is constituted in time by means of the underlying processes of the two-sided retroactive sense-constitution. This text appeals to students and researchers working in phenomenology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard’s 1996 book, The Sources of Normativity, attracted a great deal of attention. And rightly so. It is a highly engaging attempt to answer what she calls the normative question, which is the question of what could justify morality’s demands. Korsgaard’s latest book, Self-Constitution, develops and defends the broadly Kantian account of action and agency that hovers in the background of Sources, drawing out its implications for the normative question. In this review, we present the main lines (...) of argument in Self-Constitution, raising objections to both Korsgaard’s account of action and agency and her most recent attempt to address the normative question. (shrink)

An influential strand in recent action-theory employs constitutivist arguments in order to present accounts of individual agency and practical identity. I argue for an extension of this framework into the interpersonal realm, and suggest using it to reassess issues in jurisprudence. A legal system is an instantiation of the solution to the inescapable tasks of self-constituting action and identity-formation in the presence of other agents. Law's validity and normativity can be enlightened when the constitutivist approach considers the external prerequisites (...) of individuals' self-conceptions qua agents. More specifically, this argumentative strategy allows a reassessment of Fuller's “internal morality of law.” Whereas, pace Fuller, morally substantive conclusions cannot be derived from formal criteria of legality, there are unconditional normative requirements that constrain law. (shrink)

The core argument of the paper is that the modern philosophical notion of self-constitution is directed against the prospect of human beings dissolving into idleness. Arguments for self-constitution are marked by non-philosophical presuppositions about the value of usefulness. Those arguments also assume a particular conception of superior experience as conscious integration of a person’s actions within an identifiable set of chosen commitments. Exploring particular arguments by Hegel, Kant, Korsgaard and Frankfurt the paper claims that those arguments (...) are problematic in the various ways in which they suppose usefulness and explicitly or implicitly take extra-philosophical views of idleness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Limits of Self-ConstitutionJames Phillips, MD (bio)I am in general agreement with the authors that a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic approach is a good response to simple pruning procedures. That said, however, I do have questions about how they develop their argument.I was surprised at the very notion of pruning, and quite surprised that it is as popular as the authors suggest. The idea that Pete should deal with (...) his inappropriate outbursts by erasing or pruning that aspect of his personality seems so ridiculous that it beggars belief. It leaves one wondering whether Pete, or anyone agreeing with this argument, is credulous enough to think you can just prune away an undesirable part of yourself.The authors write:Importantly, this expulsion is often thought to be a good thing not simply because the undesirable elements are morally wanting but because in some important sense, they are not really a part of the agent proper. This point many seem extravagantly wishful, but is intuitively plausible.Really, “intuitively plausible” that personality traits are not part of the agent? I can understand that the agent may not grasp his or her involvement in the undesirable trait, but to argue that the trait is in reality not part of agent is a very odd claim on the part of the authors.When the authors write that “It would be difficult to exaggerate the prominence of the pruning view of agential self-constitution in philosophy,” they are strongly connecting the notions of pruning and self-constitution. I am aware that self-constitution is a major theme for philosophers like Korsgaard. The authors strongly embrace this principle in drawing out their arguments.In a footnote to their article the authors claim that various notions of a “true self” imply a pruned self. For Winnicott, an originator of the “true self,” this note of pruning does not hold. Winnicott contrasts the true self, a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, with a false self, a defensive veneer without the vivacity of the true self. The notion of pruning simply does not belong in this discussion.What the authors and their supporting philosophers leave out are two limitations to self-constitution. For the first, let me invoke another philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and his notion of “thrownness”—Geworfenheit. We are “thrown” into the world in the particular circumstances of our birth. We do not self-constitute our beginnings; we are plunged into them. The question then becomes what we make of these beginnings. [End Page 209] If they are undesirable, we can brood over them, or we can attempt to overcome them. And as we all know, if the beginnings are bad enough, we may not be able to overcome them.The second limitation to self-constitution resides in the “self.” Does the individual constitute him or her self, or is it more a matter of the self developing out of dialogic relationship of self and other? Here I invoke another philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, who has addressed this issue from a number of perspectives. At a deictic level, the “I” or the self is a shifter that takes on a different meaning depending on its context. At the level of pragmatics, the individual is engaged in illocutionary speech that is addressed to another person, implying, in simple terms, that we live in dialogue. Still more pertinent to this discussion, Ricoeur notes that self-knowledge is not straightforward: “the self does not immediately know itself, but only knows itself indirectly by way of the detour through the cultural signs of all sorts that make us say that action is symbolically mediated” (Ricoeur, 2016, p. 240). And finally, Ricoeur argues for the priority of alterity over reflexivity. “Pushing further yet the primacy of alterity over reflexivity, some will emphasize the dependence of personal identities on identifications with... heroes, emblematic characters, models and teachers” (p. 248). To clarify this statement, Ricoeur is contrasting self-constitution through reflection with a self-other relationship in which the self needs the other to constitute itself—and, of course, he is making a case for the latter.Although I am questioning the authors’ concepts of... (shrink)

It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the debate away from (...) metaphysics and epistemology towards ethics and moral psychology. Despite the important progress they make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian paradigm is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism makes it incapable of accounting for the irreducibly social dimension of the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy. In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. I then go on to provide a sketch of an alternative approach based on the notion of “self-appropriation”, distinguishing it from Rahel Jaeggi’s use of the term in her recent critique of alienation, in the process. (shrink)

Replying to the variegated responses by theologian Langdon Gilkey, philosophers Richard McClelland and Robert Deltete, and biologist Rudolf B. Brun, I emphasize three elements of my theological use of autopoietic theory: (1) Autopoietic systems are less than self‐constitutive, since they do not create themselves from scratch, but more than self‐organizing, since they are capable of producing new elements inside the local system. Correspondingly, the theological importance of autopoietic theory is not found within the doctrine of a creation out (...) of nothing but within the doctrine of non‐uniform continuous creation. (2) Locating the concept of autopoiesis within third‐generation systems theory, I underline the pluriform character of type‐different systems; the possibility of giving a full causal account from the purview of any privileged single systems (including physics) is thus denied. (3) I distinguish between two complementary roles of theology in the dialogue between science and religion: whereas theology1 offers a participatory second‐order description of the internal meaning of particular traditions of faith, theology2 provides a third‐order inquiry into the external coherence between religious and nonreligious worlds of meaning. Theology2, however, always presupposes the internal descriptions of theology1. On this basis, my use of autopoietic theory is related to the theologies of creation and providence of Paul Tillich and Langdon Gilkey; likewise, I discuss various theological strategies for relating a theology of creation to standard interpretations of evolution. (shrink)

The OECD asserts that the role of endogenous growth theory is a key input to research underlying technological processes that enhance productivity. Within neo‐liberal accounts of governance there is a paradoxical explanation of the free self, firstly as one who exercises some type of choice, and secondly as a self constituted through the exercise of choice. Neo‐liberalism, however, does not provide a robust account of self constitution. Foucault's notion of Governmentality therefore is advanced as a more (...) adequate account of the political conditions of self constitution. (shrink)

This article analyzes the concept of self-constitution in Damascius’ treatises De principiis and In Parmenidem. On the one hand, I try to see how self-constitution functions within the framework of reality. I identify the different levels of self-constituted reality, showing that each of these levels is also constituted by the absolute One, which is the cause of all things. Self-constitution is present throughout the process in which the One is slowly in labor towards (...) plurality, starting from the highest level of intelligible being down to the level of the particular soul. On the other hand, I also try to show how self-constitution appears at a discursive level. In this context I discuss its crucial role in Damascius’ interpretation of the second and third hypotheses in Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. (shrink)

Our cultural situation is to seek a moral form of self-constitution, rather than an ontological or epistemological foundation. Such a moral ground lies in the paradox of willing surrender of the will to do wrong or dysfunctional acts in order to enter temporally-extended processes of moral change. But the paradox of willing surrender of the will requires analysis. The propositional form of it cannot be sustained and must instead give way to willingness as an ongoing choice. The (...) class='Hi'>self-reflexivity of the will with which we accomplish this turns out to be a core activity of human activity that seeks openness to moral growth through humility. The paper suggests that self-constitution in this manner this is what freedom is for us and is therefore the source of our hope. (shrink)

John Fischer has recently argued that the value of acting freely is the value of self-expression. Drawing on David Velleman’s earlier work, Fischer holds that the value of a life is a narrative value and free will is valuable insofar as it allows us to shape the narrative structure of our lives. This account rests on Fischer’s distinction between regulative control and guidance control. While we lack the former kind of control, on Fischer’s view, the latter is all that (...) is needed for self-expression. I first develop Fischer’s narrative account, focusing on his reliance on temporal loops as giving us control over the value of our lives. Second, I argue that the narrative account grants us greater power over the past than Fischer would allow: since narrative allows not only for changes in how we feel about episodes in our past but what those episodes in fact were, it allows for a kind of retroactive self-constitution. Finally, I suggest that this modification of the narrative view opens the possibility of a conception of freedom far stronger than guidance control. It does not give us the libertarian control over whether to choose A or B in the present, but it does provide a measure of control over the sort of person an agent has been, and thus whether she is the sort of person who will choose A or B in the future. (shrink)

It is argued that at the center of Hegel’s phenomenology of consciousness is the notion that experience is shaped by identification and sacrifice. Experience is the process of self - constitution and self -transformation of a self -conscious being that risks its own being. The transition from desire to recognition is explicated as a transition from the tripartite structure of want and fulfillment of biological desire to a socially structured recognition that is achieved only in reciprocal (...) recognition, or reflexive recognition. At the center of the Hegelian notion of selfhood is thus the realization that selves are the locus of accountatibility. To be a self, it is concluded, is to be the subject of normative statuses that refer to commitments; it means to be able to take a normative stand on things, to commit oneself and undertake responsibilities. Key Words: commitments • desire • experience • G.W.F.Hegel • identity • recognition • risk • sacrifice • self -consciousness • self - constitution. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Following kant, idealists establish the transcendental unity of the subject as the prior condition of experience of objects. this is necessarily all-inclusive and the finite self becomes one of its phenomena, which cannot be identified with the transcendental ego, nor yet be wholly divorced from it. this is the basis of kant's paralogism of reason. t h green, f h bradley and edmund husserl are all victims of this paralogism, each in his own way. green fails to avoid it (...) by identifying the transcendental subject with the divine spiritual principle; bradley, admitting the problem's insolubility, propounds an incoherent theory of finite centers of experience; and husserl's device of 'mundanization' proves illegitimate and ambiguous under inspection. (shrink)

A subject who has a self-transformation behind herself—say, a conversion to Catholicism—may say of herself "before transforming myself, I was a different person�. How are we to understand such a claim? Obviously, there is a sense in which the subject takes herself to be the same as before and another sense in which she considers herself to be somebody else now. One possible way of understanding it would be the following: Despite the change involved in the selftransformation, there is (...) enough similiarity between the preconversion subject—S1—and the converted subject— S2—to say that they are numerically identical. And there is enough difference for the subject to speak of herself before the self-transformation as another person. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual and normative framework through which we may understand the potentially ethically significant roles that information generated by neurotechnologies about our brains and minds may play in our construction of our identities. Neuroethics debates currently focus disproportionately on the ways that third parties may (ab)use these kinds of information. These debates occlude interests we may have in whether and how we ourselves encounter information about our own brains and minds. This gap is not yet adequately addressed (...) by most allusions in the literature to potential identity impacts. These lack the requisite conceptual or normative foundations to explain why we should be concerned about such effects or how they might be addressed. This article seeks to fill this gap by presenting a normative account of identity as constituted by embodied self-narratives. It proposes that information generated by neurotechnologies can play significant content-supplying and interpretive roles in our construction of our self-narratives. It argues, to the extent that these roles support and detract from the coherence and inhabitability of these narratives, access to information about our brains and minds engages non-trivial identity-related interests. These claims are illustrated using examples drawn from empirical literature reporting reactions to information generated by implantable predictive BCIs and psychiatric neuroimaging. The article concludes by highlighting ways in which information generated by neurotechnologies might be governed so as to protect information subjects’ interests in developing and inhabiting their own identities. (shrink)

The French and Dutch referenda on the adoption of a European Constitutional Treaty highlight a remarkable ambiguity in the self‐constitution of a polity, which can be viewed as both constitution by and of a collective self. This ambiguity is a fundamental feature of polities in general, and the European Union in particular. Rather than suppressing this ambiguity, democracy—and a fortiori a European democracy worth its name—institutionalises it as the guiding principle of political action. As will transpire, (...) the conceptual and normative problems raised by political self‐constitution are linked to self‐attribution, i.e., the conditions under which a collective ascribes legislation to itself. (shrink)

This paper concerns Hegel's early treatment of the productive imagination in his 1803–1804 Faith and Knowledge. I show how he articulates that activity in terms of a pair of speculative unities, which solve lingering problems of self-knowledge and self-constitution from Kant's B-deduction. On the one hand, I argue that the familiar unity of spontaneity and receptivity makes possible knowledge of the moment of self-positing. On the other hand, I contend that Hegel's talk of imagination as both (...) an “organic idea” and an “intuitive intellect” refers to a self-constituting capacity that intellects like ours possess. I show that self-constitution is possible, for Hegel, only in so far as intellects like ours possess a capacity to unify possibility and actuality in thought, or to think themselves into being. (shrink)