Self or No-Self? (eBook)

The Debate about Selflessness and the Sense of Self. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2015

Ingolf U. Dalferth, Trevor W. Kimball (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: PDF

2018 | 1. Auflage
370 Seiten
Mohr Siebeck (Verlag)
978-3-16-155355-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Religious, philosophical, and theological views on the self vary widely. For some the self is seen as the center of human personhood, the ultimate bearer of personal identity and the core mystery of human existence. For others the self is a grammatical error and the sense of self an existential and epistemic delusion. Buddhists contrast the Western understanding of the self as a function of the mind that helps us to organize our experiences to their view of no-self by distinguishing between no-self and not-self or between a solid or 'metaphysical' self that is an illusion and an experiential or psychological self that is not. There may be processes of 'selfing', but there is no permanent self. In Western psychology, philosophy, and theology, on the other hand, the term 'self' is often used as a noun that refers not to the performance of an activity or to a material body per se but rather to a (gendered) organism that represents the presence of something distinct from its materiality. Is this a defensible insight or a misleading representation of human experience? We are aware of ourselves in the first-person manner of our ipse -identity that cannot fully be spelled out in objectifying terms, but we also know ourselves in the third-person manner of our idem -identity, the objectified self-reference to a publicly available entity. This volume documents a critical and constructive debate between critics and defenders of the self or of the no-self that explores the intercultural dimensions of this important topic.

Inhalt

Cover 1
Preface 6
Contents 8
Ingolf U. Dalferth: Introduction: The Debate about Self and Selflessness 12
I. The Making of the Self through Language 18
Ingolf U. Dalferth: Situated Selves in “Webs of Interlocution”: What Can We Learn from Grammar? 20
1. The ‘self ’ as an operator 20
2. The ‘self ’as a noun 21
3. The ‘self ’ as a verb and an adverb 23
3.1 The self as Dasein, Sosein and Wahrsein 23
3.2 The self as the relating of a relation 25
3.3 Relations, distinctions and the actual infinite 28
3.4 The self as activity and mode of relating 29
3.5 Two basic questions 32
4. Self-interpreting animals 33
4.1 Understanding and interpretation 34
4.2 Changing the world by interpreting it 35
4.3 Interpretation and self-interpretation 36
5. Selves and situations 36
5.1 The relativity and selectivity of situations 36
5.2 Shared situations 37
5.3 Re-presenting interpretations 38
6. Self-interpretations 39
7. A sense of self 41
8. A perennial problem 43
9. The ‘self ’ as an orienting device 45
Marlene Block: God, Grammar and the Truing of the Self: A Response to Ingolf Dalferth 48
1. The Utility (or not) of the View from Language 48
2. Reading Ingolf Dalferth Backwards 52
3. Beginning in the Midst of Grammar as Partes Orationis 54
4. Rethinking Language and the Self ‘from the (Indexical) Ground Up’ 57
5. Final Thoughts: Theology, Grammar, and the Truing of the Self 60
II. The European Legacy 62
Joseph S. O’Leary: The Self and the One in Plotinus 64
The Autonomy of Soul 66
Elusive Selfhood 69
Does Plotinus Need a Firmer Conception of Self? 72
Overcoming Plotinus’s Metaphysics 75
Conclusion 78
Marcelo Souza: A Question of Continuity: A Response to Joseph S. O’Leary 80
W. Ezekiel Goggin: Selfhood and Sacrifice in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 86
1. An Instructive Disjunction: Self, Not-Self, and the Limits of Reflection 87
2. Desire and the Sacrificial Structure of Recognition 90
3. Unanticipated Tasks? Some Final Remarks 94
Iben Damgaard: Kierkegaard on Self and Selflessness in Critical Dialogue with MacIntyre’s, Taylor’s and Ricoeur’s Narrative Approach to the Self 98
Introduction 98
1. The Narrative Dimension of Contemporary Hermeneutic Approaches to Selfhood 99
2. Kierkegaard’s Either-Or: To Become Oneself by Choosing Oneself 104
3. Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: To Become Oneself in Selfless Love 117
Closing Words 123
Raymond Perrier: The Grammar of ‘Self ’: Immediacy and Mediation in Either / Or: A Response to Iben Damgaard 124
1. Being a Self 126
2. Being Oneself 130
3. Dénouement 136
III. The Self in Modernity 138
Kate Kirkpatrick: ‘A Perpetually Deceptive Mirage’: Jean-Paul Sartre and Blaise Pascal on the Sinful (No?)Self 140
Introduction 140
1. Sartre’s lacking-self 141
2. Pascal on the self 145
3. Self or No-Self? 151
Eleonora Mingarelli: "It is no longer I who lives..." William James and the Process of De-selving 154
I. Breaking Through Continuity 154
1. The Teleological Mind 157
2. The Religious Self: Interest In Varieties 159
3. The Informative Self and The Process of De-Selving 164
Stephanie Gehring: After the Will: Attention and Selfhood in Simone Weil 170
Introduction 170
1. On Saying “I” 171
1.1 On Humanness: Weil and Bergson 173
1.2 Attention 174
2. Decreation 175
2.1 Decreation’s Dangers 178
3. Love in Weil’s “Prologue” 179
Conclusion 181
Joseph Prabhu: The Self in Modernity – a Diachronic and Cross-Cultural Critique 182
I. Adventures of Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche 183
II. A Tentative Genealogy 189
III. A Non-Dualist Alternative 191
A Concluding Postscript 194
Friederike Rass: The Divine in Modernity: A Theological Tweak on Joseph Prabhu’s Critique of the Modern Self 198
IV. Self and No-Self in Asian Traditions 204
Alexander McKinley: No Self or Ourselves? Wittgenstein and Language Games of Selfhood in a Sinhala Buddhist Form of Life 206
Life Training and Religious Language 206
Anaphors and Selfhood in a Sinhala Buddhist Form of Life 212
Conclusion – We are Buddhists! 218
Jonardon Ganeri: Core Selves and Dynamic Attentional Centering: Between Buddhaghosa and Brian O’Shaughnessy 222
Leah Kalmanson: Like You Mean It: Buddhist Teachings on Selflessness, Sincerity, and the Performative Practice of Liberation 230
Two Examples of the Efficacy of Proper Form 231
Buddhist and Ruist Disagreements over Proper Form 234
Philosophical Context 237
Objections to the Efficacy of Form 238
Further Speculation 241
Fidel Arnecillo Jr.: Worrisome: Implications of a Buddhist View of Selflessness and Moral Action: A Response to Leah Kalmanson 244
Gereon Kopf: Self, Selflessness, and the Endless Search for Identity: A Meta-psychology of Human Folly 250
1. Introduction 250
2. The Key to Identity Politics 251
3. Essentialism: The Metaphysics Underling Identity Politics 253
4. A Blueprint of Non-Essentialism 257
5. A Non-Essentialist Vision of Identity Formation 262
Deena Lin: Probing Identity: Challenging Essentializations of the Self in Ontology. A Response to Gereon Kopf 274
I. Relevance of Drawing from the Concrete 274
II. The “Third” 276
III. A Buddhist Call to Compassion 277
Sinkwan Cheng: Confucius, Aristotle, and a New “Right” to Connect China to Europe – What Concepts of “Self ” and “Right” We Might Have without the Christian Notion of Original Sin 280
Prologue 280
Preliminary Clarifications 282
Main Text 285
1. From Objective Right to Subjective Right: A Brief Semantic History 287
2. Subjective Right and the Christian Doctrines of Original Sin and the Fall 290
3. Right for Aristotle and Confucius, in contrast to Individual-Based Contractual Theory of Justice 292
3.1 Relational Selves 293
3.2 “Right” based on the Notion of Inter-Related Selves 296
3.2.1 Non-Subjective Right – Right being Ad Alterum, or Right as Duty 298
3.2.1.1 Aristotle’s “Right” and the Polis 300
3.2.1.1.1 General Justice 300
3.2.1.1.2 Particular Justice 302
3.2.1.2 Confucius’s “Right” and “Humanity in Grand Togetherness” (??) 303
3.2.1.2.1 Confucius’s Inter-Related Selves 305
3.2.1.2.2 Ren and Inter-Related Selves 306
Conclusion 310
Robert Overy-Brown: Right Translation and Making Right: A Response to Sinkwan Cheng 312
On Modern Liberalism 312
Questioning Original Sin 314
Universally Seeking the Good 316
Constructing Good Ethics 319
Conclusion 320
V. The End of the Self 322
Dietrich Korsch: The “Fragility of the Self ” and the Immortality of the Soul 324
Introduction 324
I. The fragility of the self 324
II. The Immortality of the Soul 327
III. Immortality and Fragility 330
Trevor Kimball: Fragile Immortality: A Response to Dietrich Korsch 334
Yuval Avnur: On Losing Your Self in Your Afterlife 338
1. What matters? 342
2. Our concepts don’t determine what could happen after death (they only determine what we’d call it) 346
3. On the coherence of a selfless afterlife that matters (to me) and defective concepts 355
4. Why are we talking about concepts instead of selves? 358
Duncan Gale: Self-Awareness in the Afterlife: A Response to Yuval Avnur 362
Information about Authors 366
Index of Names 368
Index of Subjects 370

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.1.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Geschichte der Philosophie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
• ISBN-10: 3-16-155355-1 / 3161553551
• ISBN-13: 978-3-16-155355-4 / 9783161553554