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In this article, I aim to clarify some of the ways in which the auditory dimension of the self is constituted through the mediation of technology. I show that by excluding our immediate surroundings with mobile personalized and private auditory technologies, we are increasingly laying down a personal, inner spatial grid of acoustic memories that get integrated into our narrative identity and co-constitutes the space of familiarity and belonging that gives us a sense of who we are. To do so, I first lay out a clear ontological ground. Next, I outline how the auditory dimension of the self is constituted and subsequently mediated technologically. Finally, I bring to bear Erving Goffman’s theatrical framework of performative self-constitution as a useful framework to illustrate how, on one hand, the culturally available repertoire on which the imagination draws to constitute the self has augmented thanks to the contributions of other people in distal spatiotemporal contexts; on the other, the reconfiguration of how we listen to the world and the other people in it entails muting or blocking out of other voices. This can stunt how we conceive of ourselves, producing an epistemic bubble involving a tunnel “vision” or echo-chamber effect. In addition, due to the coupling of bodily and cognitive structures with mobile, privatized auditory technologies that thereby become transparent in experience, others, by listening in on us, acquire the ability to privilege certain types of behavior while suppressing others. Thus, there is a danger that the individual autonomous agency so important to self-constitution can be compromised.

In his book Autonomous Knowledge. Radical Enhancement, Autonomy, and the Future of Knowing (OUP, 2022). J. Adam Carter argues that both propositional knowledge and know-how must include a condition of autonomy in their analyses. The book aims to propose a theory of the nature of knowledge and its value that responds to the challenge raised by cases of undue epistemic dependence and radical performance enhancement. Throughout the book, Carter articulates an idea of epistemic autonomy that fluctuates between its positive component, expressed in terms of self-direction and (rational) self-governance, and its negative component, referring to the lack of a history of compulsion or interference in the formation and retention of belief. In this article, I argue that Carter needs to bet more clearly on a positive model of autonomy. This would allow him both to unify the explanation of both know-how and propositional knowledge and to answer how the value of self-constitution, from which the value of autonomous belief derives, finds its place in the epistemic domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Acta Scientiae (1517-4492) is the property of Acta Scientiae and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper explores emotional abilities from the (neo-)existentialist perspectives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Moran. First, it reconstructs Sartre's understanding of emotions as active comportments achieving a magical transformation of the world. Second, it explores what existentialists mean by first-person authority: Regarding my own emotions, I cannot only explore what I feel, but I also need to ask myself what to feel. The claim is that my emotions depend on me committing to them. Third, I highlight a difference between a neo-existentialist account which focuses on reflective self-constitution, and a vintage existentialist approach which focuses on pre-reflective self-awareness. Forth, I point out that (neo-)existentialism helps to make explicit the normative claim which is implied when speaking of abilities regarding one's emotions. The claim is that it is up to me to either endorse my emotions or to change who I am to feel differently. Finally, I indicate the limits of such an approach when it comes to social structures of inequality and domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) represents a key area of neuromodulation that has gained wide adoption for the treatment of neurological and experimental testing for psychiatric disorders. It is associated with specific therapeutic effects based on the precision of an evolving mechanistic neuroscientific understanding. At the same time, there are obstacles to achieving symptom relief because of the incompleteness of such an understanding. These obstacles are at least in part based on the complexity of neuropsychiatric disorders and the incompleteness of DBS devices to represent prosthetics that modulate the breadth of pathological processes implicated in these disorders. Neuroprostheses, such as an implanted DBS system, can have vast effects on subjects in addition to the specific neuropsychiatric changes they are intended to produce. These effects largely represent blind spots in the current debate on neuromodulation. Anthropological accounts can illustrate the broad existential dimensions of patients' illness and responses to neural implants. In combination with current neuroscientific understanding, neuropsychiatric anthropology may illuminate the possibilities and limits of neurodevices as technical "world enablers".

Hegel criticizes the mode of reflection that is typical of the transcendental philosophy of his age. The present article explores the relevance of Hegel’s criticism with regard to contemporary transcendental philosophy, in particular that of Werner Flach. Christian Krijnen shows that, despite substantial modifications of Kant’s conception of transcendental philosophy, not least inspired by Hegel, contemporary transcendental philosophy absolutizes the logic of essence. More precisely, from the perspective of its mode of reflection, contemporary transcendental philosophy basically is an absolutized form of external reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The numbers of mental disorders, such as pathological anxiety, almost doubled in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide. This fact, in turn, demands specific medical-psychiatric intervention strategies, with digital technologies as the main means of therapeutic articulation. Paying attention to this scenario, this research seeks to investigate the modes of governmentality for the anxious subject in the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020, in the Brazilian scenario. Methodologically, the archgenealogy bias of a qualitative nature is adopted, having as corpus three materialities, one from Canal Drauzio Varela and two from Vittude Blog, analyzed in the light of Foucault's postulates. In short, social media offers a virtual environment that, even in the midst of isolation, articulates the government of itself and the other through information publications, online therapies, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some habits are vital to who we are in that they shape both our self-perception and how we are seen by others. This is so, I argue, because there is a constitutive link between what I shall call 'identity-shaping habits' and narrative agency. Identity-shaping habits are paradigmatically acquired and performed by persons. The ontology of personhood involves both synchronic and diachronic dimensions which are structurally analogous to the synchronic acquisition and the diachronic performance of habits, and makes persons distinctly suitable to being shaped by habits. Since habits differ vastly in their scope, I develop a conceptualization that carves out defining features of identity-shaping habits. Such habits, I venture, fundamentally alter a person's embodiment such that the alterations to their psychological and physiological make-up vitally inform their persistence—if not metaphysically (as in constituting necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of personal identity over time), then at least practically by crucially shaping one's narrative agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Foucault's influence on Stephen Greenblatt is a subject that has apparently gone out of date. Paul Stevens argues that Greenblatt's attempt to fashion the self through narration is influenced by Sartrcan existentialism. An examination of Greenblatt's work, however, will demonstrate that it is the Foucauldian notion of sel I-constitution of the subject that has provided the conceptual framework. Moreover, Greenblatt's conception of history is quite different from Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist history. In comparison with Sartre, Greenblatt puts more emphasis on impersonal forces and remains deeply sceptical of the Sartrean notion of absolute freedom in our actions. The fear of the loss of identity, as a malaise of modernity, has led to Greenblatt's impulse to fashion his identity through narration and can only be addressed by a materialistic account of the origin of the human subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Greeks knew a virtue term that represented the ability to determine which norms deserved commitment, a virtue term usually misunderstood as "prediction of likely outcomes" or "being hesitant": promêtheia. Plato's uses of this term, almost completely ignored by scholarship, show a sensitivity to the prerequisites for the capacity for rational agency. We must add this virtue term to the usual suspects related to acting as a rational agent: sôphrosunê, dikaiosunê, phrônesis, and sophia. Promêtheia stands out for its importance in times of ignorance of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía is the property of Centro de Investigaciones Filosoficas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía is the property of Centro de Investigaciones Filosoficas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Self-Constitution, I argue that the principles governing action are "constitutive standards" of agency, standards that arise from the nature of agency itself. To be an agent is to be autonomously efficacious, and the categorical and hypothetical imperatives arise from those two attributes. These principles are also "constitutive" of agency in two more specific ways. First, they meet the "constitution requirement": the object must meet the standard in question, at least to some extent, in order to be the kind of object that it is. Second, they meet the "self-constitution requirement": the object makes itself into the kind of object that it is by conforming to the standard. That is, the agent makes herself into an agent, and into the particular agent who she is, by conforming to those standards. Some neo-Aristotelians believe that Aristotelian virtues are constitutive standards. In this paper, I first ask why moral philosophers should focus on the virtues at all, considering the views of David Hume, Philippa Foot, and Aristotle. I then ask whether Aristotelian virtues meet the constitution requirement, and suggest that there are grounds for this view in the Nicomachean Ethics. But Aristotelian virtues do not meet the self-constitution requirement, which leaves Aristotle unable to explain moral responsibility. I end by examining the role that Aristotelian virtues could play in a Kantian ethic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I seek to clarify the role of narrative in personal unity. Examining the narrative self-constitution view developed by Marya Schechtman, I use a case of radical personal change to identify a tension in the account. The tension arises because a narrative can be regarded either to capture a continuing agent with a loosely coherent, consistent self-conception - or to unify over change and inconsistency. Two possible ways of responding, by distinguishing senses of identity or distinguishing identity and autonomy, are examined, but I argue that neither precisely maps this tension. I then develop a distinction between two ways in which narrative can unify: through "bottom-up" processes related to the connection between agency and self-conception; and "top-down" processes related to self-interpretative activity. The account provides ways to resolve some criticisms of narrative theories of identity, in particular in better accounting for the role of repudiated characteristics in narrative identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to show the conditions of subjectivity constitution in terms of dialogue and the figure of the Other. The analytical and hermeneutical approach I hold is the foundation of interdisciplinary attempt to describe possible concepts of shared relation of the terms: consciousness, subjectivity and identity. The three appear to be recognized only in the ethical situation. It requires taking responsibility for the Other, for giving him the identity which mirrors one’s subjectivity. In this way the subject learns the limits and chances for gaining self-knowledge. The paper also presents a new approach towards redefining the definition of subjectivity, which includes artificially and medically enhanced entities.

A small number of researches on motorcycle couriers investigated the conditions and types of work organization and their effects on the workers. Little is known about the employees’ characteristics in this profession. Therefore, it was aimed to analyze the entrance, permanence and abandonment of the work in this profession and its subjective and collective effects. It is a quanti-qualitative study, involving 189 workers, and accomplished using instruments and research techniques orientated by Ergology, and mobilizing approaches from the Activity-centered Ergonomics, Psychodynamics of work and Activity Clinic. The results reveal aspects that contribute to the entrance, abandonment or permanence in this profession: characteristics of work, workers’ living conditions, personal and social relations network and possibility of self-construction through work. It was concluded that the professional trajectories diversity in this occupation hinders the consolidation of professional collective, requiring from public organizations policies on formation, health promotion and quality of life.

In § 7 of the Critique of Practical Reason Kant presents his first definition of the universal law of morality--called the Categorical Imperative. In the same place, he affirms that being conscious of the law of morality is a Faktum of reason. The ambiguity of this statement has prompted some authors to argue that Kant does not deduce the moral law satisfactorily nor does he clarify how we become conscious of it. Nevertheless, they all forget in their analysis a relevant aspect of Kantian moral philosophy that turns out to be of great importance in contemporary studies of the philosophy of action--the self-constituting character of the rational subject and the role it plays within the foundation of morality. I claim that the Faktum of reason must be understood fundamentally as a self-constituting act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary pieces featuring the double depict an encounter between the protagonist and another person, who is her identical other. Therefore they face various difficulties related to a threat cast on their unique identity, and this encounter challenges their process of self-definition. Martin Buber sees the existence of the other as essential for the occurrence of self-constitution within an individual. He maintains that any person needs another person to obtain confirmation of what she is and is born equipped with the ability to confirm her fellow-person in the same way (1959). However, as the other encountered by a doppelgänger protagonist is not truly "other", the latter might confront a difficulty in the different stages of Buber's self-constitution process. This paper seeks to shed light on the inter- and intra-personal relationships depicted in literary pieces focusing on the theme of the double, such as The Double (Dostoyevsky [1846] 1997; Saramago 2002), Despair (1965), and Too Much Nina (Orbach 2011), emphasizing the limitations cast by the encounter with the identical other on the protagonist's self-constitution, as put forward by Buber. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines in a comparative manner how remembering and forgetting contribute to self-constitution in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman and William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee. In The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett embarks upon a journey from the North to the South in quest of identity. Lanterns on the Levee features a similar identity quest pursued, this time, by an autobiographer who records the very process of this quest rather than representing it by a fictional character. Percy the stoic restores realness to people in a lost world, from whom he derives his self and in whom his self is deeply rooted, by remembering the personally significant and good past and forgetting the personally insignificant and evil present. In so doing, he not only asserts his personal identity but continues to construct it in an imaginative way. Will, by contrast, seeks to constitute and ascertain his stoic identity both by attempting to forget the everydayness of ordinary life and thereby establish a genuine relationship with people and by undertaking the pursuit of a fatherly figure who echoes his tenacious memory of his father. Both Will and Percy, however, may be called what Kierkegaard calls a knight of infinite resignation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyses the system of inferences used by Kant in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to demonstrate the existence of evil disposition (Gesinnung). The author be¬lieves that, in this work, Kant introduces two innovations in respect of the fundamental project presented in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. He emphasises that freedom is not justified and postulates a transcendental structure similar to the unity of transcendental apperception in order to unify all volitions of an agent and make the initial application of freedom possible. The first innovation gives rise to a number of questions as to the justification of maxims, whereas the second leads to the theory of moral self-constitution, which was not completed within Kant’s practical philosophy. Together, they create a voluntaristic image of Kant, which undermines the philosopher’s earlier comparison of freedom with morality (the so called “reciprocity thesis”) — a fact often ignored in secondary sources.

Copyright of Trans/Form/Ação is the property of Trans/Form/Acao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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 (1) 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 (2) 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I engage with Foucault’s reading of the Platonic dialogue Alcibiades in his Hermeneutics of the Subject, developing his view that this text offers a model of the self-constitution of the subject. Foucault’s reading is part of his larger aim to find alternative conceptualizations of subjectivity besides the Cartesian ones that he thinks have dominated modern thought. His reading has been contested; but I argue that the Alcibiades does indeed develop a notion of subjectivity as reflexive and self-constituting. Moreover, two aspects of the text that Foucault misrepresents make even clearer the distance of its notion of subjecthood from a Cartesian view. First, the reflexive subject of the Alcibiades, though viewed as essentially intellectual, is the result of an ascetic practice of self-constitution. Second, this practice is essentially interpersonal, operating through reciprocal and equal dialectic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A small number of researches on motorcycle couriers investigated the conditions and types of work organization and their effects on the workers. Little is known about the employees' characteristics in this profession. Therefore, it was aimed to analyze the entrance, permanence and abandonment of the work in this profession and its subjective and collective effects. It is a quantiqualitative study, involving 189 workers, and accomplished using instruments and research techniques orientated by Ergology, and mobilizing approaches from the Activity-centered Ergonomics, Psychodynamics of work and Activity Clinic. The results reveal aspects that contribute to the entrance, abandonment or permanence in this profession: characteristics of work, workers' living conditions, personal and social relations network and possibility of self-construction through work. It was concluded that the professional trajectories diversity in this occupation hinders the consolidation of professional collective, requiring from public organizations policies on formation, health promotion and quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his later lectures, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault surveys different modalities of obtaining ‘truth’ about one's self and the world: from Socrates to the Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans and early church writers. Genealogically tracing this opposition between knowing self and world, he occasionally invites phenomenological enquiry into how this epistemic couplet bears on education. Drawing on three vignettes familiar to educators, my investigation explores modes of discovering self and world through counselling (truth-telling), distributed governance in the classroom and the arts of writing. In each case we confront a paradox of freedom, in that agency is needed, already, to liberate the self from the world. An exegetical task is to show how Foucault worked through this philosophical problem, of relevance to many situations in education, by re-reading Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: In her recent book Self‐Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, Christine Korsgaard does a wonderful job developing her Kantian account of normativity and the rational necessity of morality. Korsgaard's account of normativity, however, has received its fair share of attention. In this discussion, the focus is on the resulting moral theory and, in particular, on Korsgaard's reason for rejecting consequentialist moral theories. The article suggests that we assume that Korsgaard's vindication of Kantian rationalism is successful and ask whether, nonetheless, her account is consistent with consequentialism. It suggests further that we grant that moral reasons are not based on substantive principles, and that they must instead emerge from the purely formal principles of practical reason. Can consequentialist principles nonetheless emerge from the formal constraints of practical reason? Why can't a consequentialist embrace Korsgaard's account of self‐constitution and normativity? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]