Self or No-Self? - The Debate about Selflessness and the Sense of Self. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2015

Cover

Preface

Contents

Ingolf U. Dalferth: Introduction: The Debate about Self and Selflessness

I. The Making of the Self through Language

Ingolf U. Dalferth: Situated Selves in “Webs of Interlocution”: What Can We Learn from Grammar?

1. The ‘self ’ as an operator

2. The ‘self ’as a noun

3. The ‘self ’ as a verb and an adverb

3.1 The self as Dasein, Sosein and Wahrsein

3.2 The self as the relating of a relation

3.3 Relations, distinctions and the actual infinite

3.4 The self as activity and mode of relating

3.5 Two basic questions

4. Self-interpreting animals

4.1 Understanding and interpretation

4.2 Changing the world by interpreting it

4.3 Interpretation and self-interpretation

5. Selves and situations

5.1 The relativity and selectivity of situations

5.2 Shared situations

5.3 Re-presenting interpretations

6. Self-interpretations

7. A sense of self

8. A perennial problem

9. The ‘self ’ as an orienting device

Marlene Block: God, Grammar and the Truing of the Self: A Response to Ingolf Dalferth

1. The Utility (or not) of the View from Language

2. Reading Ingolf Dalferth Backwards

3. Beginning in the Midst of Grammar as Partes Orationis

4. Rethinking Language and the Self ‘from the (Indexical) Ground Up’

5. Final Thoughts: Theology, Grammar, and the Truing of the Self

II. The European Legacy

Joseph S. O’Leary: The Self and the One in Plotinus

The Autonomy of Soul

Elusive Selfhood

Does Plotinus Need a Firmer Conception of Self?

Overcoming Plotinus’s Metaphysics

Conclusion

Marcelo Souza: A Question of Continuity: A Response to Joseph S. O’Leary

W. Ezekiel Goggin: Selfhood and Sacrifice in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

1. An Instructive Disjunction: Self, Not-Self, and the Limits of Reflection

2. Desire and the Sacrificial Structure of Recognition

3. Unanticipated Tasks? Some Final Remarks

Iben Damgaard: Kierkegaard on Self and Selflessness in Critical Dialogue with MacIntyre’s, Taylor’s and Ricoeur’s Narrative Approach to the Self

Introduction

1. The Narrative Dimension of Contemporary Hermeneutic Approaches to Selfhood

2. Kierkegaard’s Either-Or: To Become Oneself by Choosing Oneself

3. Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: To Become Oneself in Selfless Love

Closing Words

Raymond Perrier: The Grammar of ‘Self ’: Immediacy and Mediation in Either / Or: A Response to Iben Damgaard

1. Being a Self

2. Being Oneself

3. Dénouement

III. The Self in Modernity

Kate Kirkpatrick: ‘A Perpetually Deceptive Mirage’: Jean-Paul Sartre and Blaise Pascal on the Sinful (No?)Self

Introduction

1. Sartre’s lacking-self

2. Pascal on the self

3. Self or No-Self?

Eleonora Mingarelli: "It is no longer I who lives..." William James and the Process of De-selving

I. Breaking Through Continuity

1. The Teleological Mind

2. The Religious Self: Interest In Varieties

3. The Informative Self and The Process of De-Selving

Stephanie Gehring: After the Will: Attention and Selfhood in Simone Weil

Introduction

1. On Saying “I”

1.1 On Humanness: Weil and Bergson

1.2 Attention

2. Decreation

2.1 Decreation’s Dangers

3. Love in Weil’s “Prologue”

Conclusion

Joseph Prabhu: The Self in Modernity – a Diachronic and Cross-Cultural Critique

I. Adventures of Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche

II. A Tentative Genealogy

III. A Non-Dualist Alternative

A Concluding Postscript

Friederike Rass: The Divine in Modernity: A Theological Tweak on Joseph Prabhu’s Critique of the Modern Self

IV. Self and No-Self in Asian Traditions

Alexander McKinley: No Self or Ourselves? Wittgenstein and Language Games of Selfhood in a Sinhala Buddhist Form of Life

Life Training and Religious Language

Anaphors and Selfhood in a Sinhala Buddhist Form of Life

Conclusion – We are Buddhists!

Jonardon Ganeri: Core Selves and Dynamic Attentional Centering: Between Buddhaghosa and Brian O’Shaughnessy

Leah Kalmanson: Like You Mean It: Buddhist Teachings on Selflessness, Sincerity, and the Performative Practice of Liberation

Two Examples of the Efficacy of Proper Form

Buddhist and Ruist Disagreements over Proper Form

Philosophical Context

Objections to the Efficacy of Form

Further Speculation

Fidel Arnecillo Jr.: Worrisome: Implications of a Buddhist View of Selflessness and Moral Action: A Response to Leah Kalmanson

Gereon Kopf: Self, Selflessness, and the Endless Search for Identity: A Meta-psychology of Human Folly

1. Introduction

2. The Key to Identity Politics

3. Essentialism: The Metaphysics Underling Identity Politics

4. A Blueprint of Non-Essentialism

5. A Non-Essentialist Vision of Identity Formation

Deena Lin: Probing Identity: Challenging Essentializations of the Self in Ontology. A Response to Gereon Kopf

I. Relevance of Drawing from the Concrete

II. The “Third”

III. A Buddhist Call to Compassion

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

Prologue

Preliminary Clarifications

Main Text

1. From Objective Right to Subjective Right: A Brief Semantic History

2. Subjective Right and the Christian Doctrines of Original Sin and the Fall

3. Right for Aristotle and Confucius, in contrast to Individual-Based Contractual Theory of Justice

3.1 Relational Selves

3.2 “Right” based on the Notion of Inter-Related Selves

3.2.1 Non-Subjective Right – Right being Ad Alterum, or Right as Duty

3.2.1.1 Aristotle’s “Right” and the Polis

3.2.1.1.1 General Justice

3.2.1.1.2 Particular Justice

3.2.1.2 Confucius’s “Right” and “Humanity in Grand Togetherness” (??)

3.2.1.2.1 Confucius’s Inter-Related Selves

3.2.1.2.2 Ren and Inter-Related Selves

Conclusion

Robert Overy-Brown: Right Translation and Making Right: A Response to Sinkwan Cheng

On Modern Liberalism

Questioning Original Sin

Universally Seeking the Good

Constructing Good Ethics

Conclusion

V. The End of the Self

Dietrich Korsch: The “Fragility of the Self ” and the Immortality of the Soul

Introduction

I. The fragility of the self

II. The Immortality of the Soul

III. Immortality and Fragility

Trevor Kimball: Fragile Immortality: A Response to Dietrich Korsch

Yuval Avnur: On Losing Your Self in Your Afterlife

1. What matters?

2. Our concepts don’t determine what could happen after death (they only determine what we’d call it)

3. On the coherence of a selfless afterlife that matters (to me) and defective concepts

4. Why are we talking about concepts instead of selves?

Duncan Gale: Self-Awareness in the Afterlife: A Response to Yuval Avnur

Information about Authors

Index of Names

Index of Subjects