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In the seventy-sixth episode of the celebrated HBO series The Sopranos (1999-2007), two New Jersey mob wives go on an expensive Paris boondoggle. Rosalie Aprile, the widow of the former [...]

In 'The Arch and the Keystone,' Mythlore 38:1 (Fall/Winter 2019), 5-17, Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger argues that the conflicts and contradictions she sees in Tolkien's essays and fiction do not call for harmonization but rather should be embraced for what they are: 'two opposing and conflicting sides of one person, whose contention makes him who he is as well as what he is, the keystone that creates the arch' of The Lord of the Rings (16) out of the friction of the two sides. Her argument has the virtue of helping us to take both darkness and light in the legendarium with full seriousness. Unfortunately, the alleged contradictions, e.g. between the despair of the Beowulf essay and the hope for eucatastrophe in the essay 'On Fairie Stories,' reflected by light and darkness in The Lord of the Rings, are created by Flieger's failure fully to understand Tolkien's biblical worldview, where the impossibility of salvation in this life does not contradict, but is the logical setting for, the hope of a redemption not fully realized until the next. Thus an understanding of Tolkien's biblical eschatology dissolves the alleged tension and lets us supplement Flieger's keystone with the cornerstone of Tolkien's worldview, which shows us that the coherence, rather than the contradiction, of Flieger's elements can also function as a useful window on the power of Tolkien's sub-creation. Additional Keywords Mythlore; Keystone or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged 'Conflicting Sides' of Tolkien's Singular Self; Donald T. Williams; eschatology; history; time; eternity; worldview, The unmatched refracting power of Tolkien's secondary creation of Middle-earth as a lens to bring into pregnant focus the sheer concentrated goodness of the primary creation, the poignant mixture of [...]

How does brain make a mind? How does mind make a self? Thinking about thinking things, and the thinkers who think them, do you think your thoughts, or do your [...]

Maryse Conde, the celebrated Guadeloupean novelist and critic, has produced three separate and distinct autobiographies, Le coeur a rire et a pleurer (1999), La vie sans fards (2012), and Mets et merveilles (2015). These works engage a series of latent paradoxes and contradictions that implicitly subvert claims to autobiographical veracity, but there remain traces of the author's sojourns and encounters that can be unearthed in a number of other texts. If autobiography functions by creating a split between past and present selves, such a division, in temporal and psychological terms, is itself doubled in character, content, and implication, while the typically linear structure of autobiographical narratives assumes that we have access to the truth of the autobiographer's life and experience(s). In Conde's works, both the discernible facts of her life and manner of their representation generate a creative instability, as writing and the invention of subjectivity encounter the presumed infallibility of memory., I Maryse Conde, the celebrated Guadeloupean novelist and critic, has in a sense emblematized her claims to transnationalism and nomadism by producing, at last count, three separate and distinct autobiographies, [...]

Aiming to put Freud's writings in dialogue with Shakespeare's Hamlet, this essay considers the burden of speaking for oneself as the burden of what it means to call oneself into being against the precedence--the authority and priority--of another., The question of the archive remains the same: What comes first? Even better: Who comes first? And second? --Derrida, Archive Fever 37 In Love and Its Place in Nature, Jonathan [...]

I. Introduction Several philosophers, in both Buddhist philosophy (see, e.g., Zahavi, Thompson, and Siderits 2011) and Western philosophy (Unger 1979a, 1979b, 1979c; Stone 2005) have claimed that the self does [...]

This article will argue that Tao Yuanming [phrase omitted] (ca. 360-425) recognized a tension between being himself (ziran [phrase omitted]) and the natural transformations of the world (hua). While he [...]

Introduction This essay investigates the Zhuangzian theory of the self, which has long been the subject of a heated and controversial debate in Chinese intellectual history. According to an interpretation [...]

One of the most important and least well-understood notions in Watsuji Tetsuro's philosophical oeuvre is the concept of fudo [phrase omitted], which has been variously translated into English as climate [...]

But if the self were equal to the aggregates It must, since there are many, be a multiplicity And it would be substantial, visible like every other thing And not [...]

The question of selfhood is often the question of what it is that asks this question in a momentary or in an enduring way throughout one's life. It is an [...]

IN A PIVOTAL SCENE IN Samuel Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Harriet Byron, distracted by her 'scribbling' and not yet fully dressed, is interrupted by Charlotte and Lady [...]

The Romantic period bears witness to a scene where the Romantic subject is capable of selflessness and loss of self in its interaction with an ideal visionary beloved. The Romantics [...]

Buddhist reductionism (BR) is the view that there is no self and that, strictly speaking, our talk of persons should be better understood as talk of fictional entities. (1) The [...]

Jamaica Kincaid's travel narrative, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005), can be a difficult text with which to engage. One demarcation of reader discomfort with this text may [...]

Whatever diaries may lack in narrative cohesion and fullness, even in consistent fidelity to fact, they promise what is loosely called 'voice'--the specific value of self-representation, especially by those passed [...]

INTRODUCTION This discussion of how the collection of data about lives re-forms life narrative begins in what might seem an unlikely place: with a description of mobile and mediated subjectivity [...]

This essay offers a new interpretation of the butterfly dream in the Zhuangzi, which has been the focus of vigorous inquiries and heated debates in recent years. The novelty of this attempt lies in identifying a line of reasoning in the 'Qiwulun' chapter that embodies a deep puzzle about the nature of self and in unpacking how the butterfly dream passage at the end of that chapter addresses the puzzle in question. Such a reading is cast within a larger context of the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, where death is a major theme. The idea of interpreting the butterfly dream in connection with the issue of death is not new. However, this idea has never been made sufficiently clear. An attempt will be made to provide a sensible and plausible reading of the butterfly dream that it is hoped will be relevant and beneficial to contemporary philosophy of self and death., Identifying the theme of self and death as central to the 'Qiwulun'--or Discussion on Making All Things Equal (3)--is at odds with a majority of interpreters: they tend to see [...]

As if back into a womb, I crawl-- --Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull 4 INTRODUCTION Imagination disrupts documentary, as Antjie Krog compares the experience of attending the opening hearings [...]

I first met Pat Williams about twenty years ago. The Ford Foundation had given me a grant to set up a faculty seminar on human identity. I had proposed to [...]

At the turn of the nineteenth century diverse disciplines diagnosed the dissolution of the Cartesian notion of the self-from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis to Ernst Mach's materialist devastation of the psyche [...]

An important theme within postmodern feminism is the critique of essentialist notions of human beings in general and of women in particular. Many anti-essentialist feminists start with a critique of [...]

THOMAS AQUINAS FREQUENTLY uses the maxim liber est causa sui--a sentence most easily translated as 'The free is the cause of itself.' (1) Thomas usually cites this maxim, which he [...]

Because he struggles with no one, no one can struggle with the Sage. --Dao De Jing (1) I. Pathologies of Passion In his seminal study, Philosophy as a Way of [...]

This article reviews recent evidence from the fields of cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, behavioral neuroscience, and social psychology that call into question the model of the self that underlies current dominant approaches to ethics in Western philosophy, pointing to the crucial role of affect, embodiment, and metaphorical extension in moral judgments and decision making. It then examines the implications of these results for moral philosophy, concluding that the virtue-ethical model of self-cultivation more accurately represents how real human beings engage in moral reasoning, and is also better adapted as an educational technique to the evolved cognitive architecture of human beings than deontological or utilitarian approaches. Finally, turning to early Confucianism, it will suggest some of the ways in which Mencius' views about morality and ethical education strikingly anticipate findings coming out of the modern Western cognitive sciences, and therefore how thinkers such as Mencius can serve as an important conceptual resource in envisioning what an empirically responsible modern virtue ethic might look like., In his well-known 1994 work Descartes' Error, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes his work with patients suffering from damage to the prefrontal cortex, a center of emotion processing in the [...]

Beginning with some autobiographical reflections on divisions between self and other, this article draws on Trinh T. Minh-ha, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Giorgio Agamben in order to engage [...]

Introduction The utilization of Western canonical thinkers to inform and understand thinkers from India and China is nothing new. More specifically, it is very tempting for a Western-trained philosopher to [...]

Abstract This essay explores the drama of selfhood and the attendant problem of ethics in Brian Friel's Faith Healer. Drawing from the tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis, I scrutinize the protagonist's [...]

In this article, I examine the concepts of the self and emotion reflected in American middle-class socialization practices. Detailed ethnographic description of everyday socialization practices in an American middle-class preschool shows that contrary to the characterization that American notions of self and emotion are predominantly individualistic and egocentric, middle-class socialization practices are highly oriented toward developing sociocentric values such as niceness, cooperation, social appropriateness, empathy, friendship, politeness, and manners. I argue that the dichotomous model of self and emotion that consists of only two types--an egocentric Western self and a sociocentric non-Western self--fails to adequately describe variations and complexity in American experiences of self and emotion. The article contributes to a growing body of research that critically discusses the bipolarized model and argues for inherent dynamism and heterogeneity in our conceptions of the self and emotions. KEY WORDS: Self, Emotion, Socialization, American middle-class

1. Introduction A principle of self-ownership has broad appeal in moral and political philosophy, in several distinguishable respects. The first of these is its appeal across the political spectrum. Although [...]

Over the years, philosophers, psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, and others have asked: Is there such a thing as a self? Does the self exist? What is a self? In the following [...]

I THINK IT ONLY APPROPRIATE TO BEGIN A PAPER ON RELIGIOUS and secular selves by invoking the words of the tenth-century Muslim mystic al-Hallaj, who famously declared "Aha al'haq"--"I am [...]

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I elicit a number of ways in which, according to the Sartre of The Transcendence of the Ego, we can miss the truth about our own [...]

The relation between the concepts of the subject of apperception, the phenomenal self, and the noumenal self has long puzzled commentators on Kant's theoretical account of the self. This paper argues that many of the puzzles surrounding Kant's account can be resolved by treating the subject of apperception and other transcendental predicates of thinking as a dimension of the noumenal self. Yet this interpretation requires a clarification of how the transcendental predicates of thinking can be attributed to the noumenal self without violating the thesis of noumenal ignorance. The clarification is achieved through a careful analysis of the meaning of the latter thesis. The paper's interpretation is then shown to be consistent with Kant's rejection of traditional ontology and with the dual-aspect view. The paper's final section argues that transcendental predicates are properly construed as logical predicates but must be distinguished from ordinary examples of the latter.

Byline: Shlomit Levy (1), Clara Sabbagh (2) Keywords: Wellbeing; Facet theory; Personality; Self Abstract: Leaning on the formal faceted definition of wellbeing (Levy and Guttman (1975) Social Indicators Research, 2, 361--388), a mapping sentence is provided for defining the universe of observations of the wellbeing of the self-expanding on personality aspects. The structure of the interrelationships among the variables of the expanded conceptualization of self's personality is examined by the use of the SSA technique. The sample consists of 176 adult residents (20 years of age and over) from all parts of the city of Jerusalem, Israel. Results further verify the circular structure (radex) of personal wellbeing. The state of wellbeing-versus- wellbeing in the sense of possession of resources partition the space into two concentric belts, while the life domains of wellbeing play a polarizing role in partitioning the space into wedglike regions emanating from a common origin. Self's personality domains-versus-self's social environment domains serve as a rationale for the circular order. The expanded conceptualization of personal wellbeing enhance the earlier conceptualization of the 1975 study and makes possible the development of the theory of the structure of the wellbeing of the self in a systematic cumulative fashion. Author Affiliation: (1) Institute for Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, 91905, Israel (2) Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel Haifa, 31905, Israel Article History: Registration Date: 11/02/2008 Received Date: 20/11/2007 Accepted Date: 11/02/2008 Online Date: 07/03/2008

This article departs from the prevailing focus in critical interpretations of La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. on the textual display of female sexuality, and seeks to explore instead the [...]

Janet Frame's autobiographical novella Towards Another Summer, was published posthumously in 2007. (1) It was produced in 1963, when Frame was living in London just after The Edge of the [...]

Identical trait labels may be understood differently in thinking about self and in thinking about others. Specifically, when making self-judgments, individuals define traits primarily in terms of unobservable manifestations, e.g., how one feels. However, in making other-judgments, particularly in making judgments about relatively unfamiliar others, individuals define traits primarily in terms of observable manifestations, e.g., how one looks. This prediction was tested in three experiments (Exp. 1: N=96, Polish undergraduates including 19 men, 77 women; Exp. 2: N=96, U.S. undergraduates including 18 men, 78 women; Exp. 3: N=74, Polish undergraduates including 18 men, 56 women). Participants were asked to perform a generic trait judgment task followed by a specific trait judgment task in which the same traits were preceded by a qualifier 'feels' or 'looks'. As expected, in the case of self-judgments, generic judgments predicted feels judgments better than looks judgments. This pattern did not occur for judgments of others and was reversed for judgments about others who were relatively unfamiliar.

This article explores how contemporary cognitive theory informs the 'weird' nature of contemporary, small-press speculative fiction. By applying theories of consciousness presented by thinkers such as Daniel C. Dennett, David Bohm, Ernest Keen, and Ulric Neisser (among others) to theories of fantastic narrative presented by scholars such as Tzvetan Todorov, Mieke Bal, and Robert Scholes (among others), this article argues that the bizarre nature of narrative consciousness is, in fact, not 'weird' and is a more accurate portrayal of 'selves' (both textual and material) than the experimental modes that preceded it. This paper presents the stance that experimental speculative fiction by authors such as Kelly Link, George Saunders, Jeffrey Ford, and others inverts the traditional distinctions of mimetic versus poi'etic literature and destabilizes concepts of traditional realism., None of this is as simple as it sounds, but one must start somewhere even though such placement inevitably entails the telling of a lie. --KAREN JOY FOWLER, 'Lieserl' THERE [...]

Speculative subjectivity as expressed in the works of Octavia Butler and Luce Irigaray is analyzed. Both of them seek a method to probe dualism in terms of mind/body as well as self/other and they use the body for exploring intersubjective fusion using the metaphor of maternity.

The conception of subjectivity that dominates the Western philosophical tradition, particularly during the Enlightenment, sets up a simple dichotomy: either the subject is ultimately autonomous or it is merely a causally determined thing. Fichte and Freud challenge this model by formulating theories of subjectivity that transcend this opposition. Fichte conceives of the subject as based in absolute activity, but that activity is qualified by a check for which it is not ultimately responsible. Freud explains the behavior of the self in terms of biological drives and social pressures, yet both forces are actively interpreted by the subject itself. The tensions that arise from these very different approaches show that both Fichte and Freud are trying to overcome this deeply imbedded dichotomy between freedom and determinism. Although some would respond to these tensions by trying to forge a Hegelian synthesis, such a resolution covers over the paradoxical nature of finite subjectivity.

Abstract: This paper examines the ethical status of animals and nature within the thought of Mary Whiton Calkins. Though Calkins held that her self-psychology and absolute personalistic idealism were compatible [...]

This essay takes up the question of whether the self constitutes the other (as Husserl believed) or whether the other institutes the self (as Levinas argues). It examines how Derrida's [...]