Contingency,Historicity, and Integrity

The author of this paper contends that Kathleen Wallace’s model of the self is a highly original contribution to contemporary thought. He, however, highlights important respects in which Wallace is adumbrating themes highlighted by Justus Buchler’s scattered insights into human selfhood. In addition, the author identifies two possible lines of inquiry rooted in Wallace’s project calling for further pursuit. Questions regarding self-division, ones importantly bearing upon the topic of autonomy, and also questions regarding the somatic mechanisms, processes, and practices by which embodied selves maintain themselves as cumulative networks are ones that, above all else, he tries to throw into sharp relief through the defining features of Wallace’s network model and to underscore the inherent power of Wallace’s nuanced approach to a highly contested and intricately complex topic.     

The Selves of Lindsey

Kathleen Wallace’s The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity (2019) presents an understanding of personal identity and selfhood. Its central conundrum is how a person or self can be a something that, while being related to and even constituted by many things, including endless experiences and events and social roles, hence subject to continuous change, can nevertheless sustain an identity capable of responsible agency and all the other moral and narrative predicates so crucial to us. In response Wallace creates a Cumulative Network Model of the self, rooted in the relational and social analysis of human individuality characteristic of the American philosophical tradition, that, while processural and complex in the extreme, is nevertheless capable of autonomy and responsibility. Her account provides a novel paradigm for the analysis of human self, but with its very complexity raises questions as to the relation between the referents of “person,” “self,” and “I.”     

Blaming friends

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the complex relations between friendship and blame. In the first part, I show that to be friends is to have certain evaluative, emotional and behavioral dispositions toward each other, and distinguish between two kinds of norms of friendship, namely friendship-based obligations and friendship-constituting rules. Friendship-based obligations tag actions of friends as obligatory, permissible or wrong, whereas friendship-constituting rules specify conditions that, if met, make it so that two persons stand in a particular type of relationship defined by various friendship-based obligations. I argue that whereas friendship-based obligations apply to actions under direct voluntary control, friendship-constituting rules apply to emotional and evaluative attitudes. The second part develops an account of friendship blame by comparing Scanlon’s account of blame with Wallace’s Strawsonian account of blame. I demonstrate that Scanlon’s account picks out responses that become appropriate when friends’ attitudes are not in agreement with friendship-constituting rules, whereas Wallace’s account picks out responses that become appropriate when friends violate friendship-based obligations. Arguing that the responses picked out by Scanlon’s account do not amount to blame, I show that, when combined, the views give an illuminating picture of possible reactions to friends who fall short of the standards of friendship.

     

REPLY TO JULIA DRIVER,TIMM TRIPLETT,AND KATHLEEN WALLACE

Abstract: Julia Driver, Timm Triplett, and Kathleen Wallace challenge my account of moral arrogance, and Triplett and Wallace challenge its application to the problem of abortion. I try to show here that Driver's attempt to defend consequentialism from my charge that it promotes moral arrogance is successful only if consequentialism explicitly gives up what has been considered one of its major virtues. I acknowledge that Triplett has uncovered some unclarity in my claim that the moral acceptability of abortion is an unresolvable moral issue. I also acknowledge that Wallace has uncovered some unclarity in my account of moral arrogance. After clarifying that account, I try to meet her challenge to defend my claim that it is not morally arrogant for a state to place some restrictions on abortions.     

Integrity and the Value of an Integrated Self

What is integrity and why is it valuable? One account of the nature of integrity, proposed by John Cottingham amongst others, is The Integrated Self View. On this account integrity is a formal relation of coherence between various aspects of a person. One problem that has been raised against this account is that it isn’t obvious that it can account for the value of integrity. In this paper I will respond to this problem by providing an account of the value of an integrated self. I will do so by first looking closely at two examples from literature: John Sassal in John Berger’s A Fortunate Man and Tetrius Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Based on my comparison of these two case studies I will argue that an integrated self is valuable as it makes people more likely to act in line with their moral judgements.     

A theory of the normative force of pleas

A familiar feature of our moral responsibility practices are pleas: considerations, such as “That was an accident”, or “I didn’t know what else to do”, that attempt to get agents accused of wrongdoing off the hook. But why do these pleas have the normative force they do in fact have? Why does physical constraint excuse one from responsibility, while forgetfulness or laziness does not? I begin by laying out R. Jay Wallace’s (Responsibility and the moral sentiments, 1994) theory of the normative force of excuses and exemptions. For each category of plea, Wallace offers a single governing moral principle that explains their normative force. The principle he identifies as governing excuses is the Principle of No Blameworthiness without Fault: an agent is blameworthy only if he has done something wrong. The principle he identifies as governing exemptions is the Principle of Reasonableness: an agent is morally accountable only if he is normatively competent. I argue that Wallace’s theory of exemptions is sound, but that his account of the normative force of excuses is problematic, in that it fails to explain the full range of excuses we offer in our practices, especially the excuses of addiction and extreme stress. I then develop a novel account of the normative force of excuses, which employs what I call the “Principle of Reasonable Opportunity,” that can explain the full range of excuses we offer and that is deeply unified with Wallace’s theory of the normative force of exemptions. An important implication of the theory I develop is that moral responsibility requires free will.     

Joseph Margolis on Pragmatism

This paper begins with a memoir of the author’s interactions with Joseph Margolis that delineates both Margolis’s importance as a teacher and their disagreements on aspects of American philosophy. It then turns to Margolis’s discussions of pragmatism as a philosophical movement, with an emphasis on his understanding of John Dewey. The paper considers, third, Margolis’s account of the decline and rebirth of pragmatism, the latter process attributed largely to the work of Richard Rorty. The paper concludes with an examination of what it sees as Margolis’s most valuable work: his explorations of the nature of the self and of human society.     

Narrative and the Stability of Intention

This paper addresses a problem concerning the rational stability of intention. When you form an intention to φ at some future time t, you thereby make it subjectively rational for you to follow through and φ at t, even if—hypothetically—you would abandon the intention were you to redeliberate at t. It is hard to understand how this is possible. Shouldn't the perspective of your acting self be what determines what is then subjectively rational for you? I aim to solve this problem by highlighting a role for narrative in intention. I'll argue that committing yourself to a course of action by intending to pursue it crucially involves the expectation that your acting self will be ‘swept along’ by its participation in a distinctively narrative form of self‐understanding. I'll motivate my approach by criticizing Richard Holton's and Michael Bratman's recent treatments of the stability of intention, though my account also borrows from Bratman's work. I'll likewise criticize and borrow from David Velleman's work on narrative and self‐intelligibility. When the pieces fall into place, we'll see how intending is akin to telling your future self a kind of story. My thesis is not that you address your acting self but that your acting self figures as a ‘character’ in the ‘story’ that you address to a still later self. Unlike other appeals to narrative in agency, mine will explain how as narrator you address a specifically intrapersonal audience.     

Intensity and the Sublime: Paying Attention to Self and Environment in Nature Sports

This paper responds to Kevin Krein’s claim in (2015) that the particular value of nature sports over traditional ones is that they offer intensity of sport experience in dynamic interaction between an athlete and natural features. He denies that this intensity is derived from competitive conflict of individuals and denies that nature sport derives its value from internal conflict within the athlete who carries out the activity. This paper responds directly to Krein by analysing ‘intensity’ in sport in terms of the relationship between attention and reflection and the interaction between self and environment. I reply directly to Krein’s rejection of self-competition as based on a mischaracterisation of internal struggle and argue that the weighing of incompatible desires does not involve a fragmented self. I argue that the unique intensity to which Krein refers is strongly comparable to the Kantian conception of the sublime and explore how sublime experience fits Krein’s account and outline some serious problems that such an ideal of experience poses for nature sport.     

Trauma,narcissism and the two attractors in trauma1

In this paper, the author sets out to distinguish anew between two concepts that have become sorely entangled‐‘trauma’ and ‘narcissism’. Defi ning ‘narcissism’ in terms of an interaction between the selfobject and the self that maintains a protective shield, and ‘trauma’ as attacks on this protective shield, perpetrated by bad objects, he introduces two attractors present in trauma‐‘the hole attractor’ and the structure enveloping it, ‘the narcissistic envelope’. The hole attractor pulls the trauma patient, like a ‘black hole’, into a realm of emotional void, of hole object transference, devoid of memories and where often in an analyst's countertransference there are no reverberations of the trauma patient's experience. In the narcissistic envelope, on the other hand, motion, the life and death drive and fragments of memory do survive. Based on the author's own clinical experience with Holocaust survivors, and on secondary sources, the paper concludes with some clinical implications that take the two attractors into account.     

Bare Personhood? Velleman on selfhood

In the Introduction to Self to Self, J. David Velleman claims that ‘the word “self” does not denote any one entity but rather expresses a reflexive guise under which parts or aspects of a person are presented to his own mind’ (Velleman 2006, 1). Velleman distinguishes three different reflexive guises of the self: the self of the person's self-image, or narrative self-conception; the self of self-sameness over time; and the self as autonomous agent. Velleman's account of each of these different guises of the self is complex and repays close philosophical attention. The first aim of this paper is therefore to provide a detailed analysis of Velleman's view. The second aim is more critical. While I am in agreement with Velleman about the importance of distinguishing the different aspects of selfhood, I argue that, even on his own account, they are more interrelated than he acknowledges. I also analyse the role of the concept of ‘bare personhood’ in Velleman's approach to selfhood and question whether this concept can function, as he wants it to, to bridge the gap between a naturalistic analysis of reasons for action and Kantian moral reasons.     

I See Dead People: Insights From the Humanities Into the Nature of Plastinated Cadavers

Accounts from the humanities which focus on describing the nature of whole body plastinates are examined. We argue that this literature shows that plastinates do not clearly occupy standard cultural binary categories of interior or exterior, real or fake, dead or alive, bodies or persons, self or other and argue that Noël Carroll’s structural framework for horrific monsters unites the various accounts of the contradictory or ambiguous nature of plastinates while also showing how plastinates differ from horrific fictional monsters. In doing so, it offers an account of the varied reactions of those responding to exhibitions of plastinated whole bodies.     

The Merits of Eudaimonism

This paper starts with Immanuel Kant’s definition of “eudaimonism” (a term he created) as a single‐source account of motivation, and explains why he thinks the eudaimonist is unacceptably self‐regarding. In order to modify and improve Kant’s account, the paper then revisits the Christian scholastics. Scotus is distinguished from Aquinas on the grounds that Scotus has a more robust conception of the will that encompasses the ranking of the affection for advantage (for the agent’s happiness and perfection) and the affection for justice (for what is good in itself, independent of this relation to the agent). This is a double‐source account of motivation. With these conceptual resources in hand, the paper goes on to examine Jean Porter’s defense of eudaimonism, urging that she begs the question against the Scotist view. Finally, the paper makes a conciliating suggestion that preserves most, but not all, of what the eudaimonist wants.     

The ‘Constitutive Thought’ of Regret

In this paper I defend and develop Bernard Williams’ claim that the ‘constitutive thought’ of regret is ‘something like “how much better if it had been otherwise”’. An introductory section on cognitivist theories of emotion is followed by a detailed investigation of the concept of ‘agent-regret’ and of the ways in which the ‘constitutive thought’ might be articulated in different situations in which agents acknowledge casual responsibility for bringing about undesirable outcomes. Among problematic cases discussed are those in which agents have caused harm through no fault of their own, or have been constrained to choose the lesser of two evils or to act against their moral values. R. Jay Wallace’s ‘bourgeois predicament’ and related cases, in which we recognize that our present advantages have flowed from regrettable antecedents, further show that regret is often not a simple emotion, and it is argued that conflicted regrets are sometimes unavoidable. Finally, the paper looks at Descartes’ account of regret as a form of sadness engendered by the recollection of irrecoverable happy experiences, to which the ‘constitutive thought’ does not readily apply. It is suggested that what Descartes is discussing is a different genre of emotion for which ‘nostalgia’ might be a better name.     

A Buddhist Explanation of Episodic Memory: From Self to Mind

In this paper, I argue that some of the work to be done by the concept of self is done by the concept of mind in Buddhist philosophy. For the purposes of this paper, I shall focus on an account of memory and its ownership. The task of this paper is to analyse Vasubandhu’s heroic effort to defend the no-self doctrine against the Nyāya-Vai?e?ikas in order to bring to the fore the Buddhist model of mind. For this, I will discuss Vasubandhu’s theory of mind in the early Abhidharma as well as post-Abhidharma period to show the continuity in his work.     

On the Meaning of Being Real: Fantasy and ‘the Real’ in Personal Identity-Formation

Abstract

With the help of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, this article addresses certain perplexities concerning personal identity that emerge from different kinds of interpersonal encounters. Lacan’s notion of the ‘fundamental fantasy’ incorporates the insight that phantasmic projections (of both self and other) form the basis of personal identity and interpersonal relations are a complex interplay between such projections. Nevertheless, in face of disconcerting pretence phenomena, the notion of a real self plays a profoundly important part in interpersonal relations. To call some phantasmic projections ‘pretensions’ or ‘delusions’ is simultaneously to admit that some must, by contrast, embody or express a real self. Lacan’s paradoxical answer to the question of whether the fundamental fantasy embodies the real self is ‘yes and no’. To explain this, I unpack the notion of the fundamental fantasy insofar as it is construed as the basis upon which we construct a complex identity (a semblance) imperfectly shielded from the traumatic Real. I offer an indirect account of the Real, via a critique of Rowlands on absurdity. I then sketch the developmental formation of a complex semblance, guided at its core by the fundamental fantasy, which structures the comportment of the self with a three-fold other. While the fundamental fantasy forms the core of a person’s identity and might be named the basis of the real self, Lacan warns that one must traverse it to acknowledge the Real in oneself. I elaborate on this via Derrida’s conception of the parergon. My aim is to demonstrate the irreducible complexity of identity formation and to show that to be real is to accept the uncertainty associated with acknowledging the Real in me that exceeds both my pretensions and the phantasmic reality that structures my identity.     

The body one has and the body one is: Understanding the transsexual’s need to be seen

The transsexual individual confronts the analyst with a disturbing otherness. How this otherness is understood, that is, how the analyst ‘looks’ at the patient through her distinctive theoretical lens impacts, in turn, on the patient’s experience and what transpires between them. In this paper the author outlines a developmental model rooted in attachment and object relations theory to provide one alternative way of ‘looking’ at some of these patients’ experiences in the clinical setting. It is suggested that in some cases of transsexuality the primary object(s) did not mirror and contain an early experience of incongruity between the given body and the subjective experience of gender: it remains unmentalized and disrupts self‐coherence leading to the pursuit of surgery that is anticipated to ‘guarantee’ relief from the incongruity. Through an account of work with a male to female (MtF) transsexual who underwent surgery during her five years of psychotherapy, the author explores how a focus on the transsexual’s experience of ‘being seen’, that is, of being taken in (or not) visually and mentally by the object in their state of incongruity, affords another window through which to approach the transsexual’s experience in the transference–countertransference dynamics.