The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal IdentityAcross his relatively short and eccentric authorial career, Søren Kierkegaard develops a unique, and provocative, account of what it is to become, to be, and to lose a self, backed up by a rich phenomenology of self-experience. Yet Kierkegaard has been almost totally absent from the burgeoning analytic philosophical literature on self-constitution and personal identity. How, then, does Kierkegaard's work appear when viewed in light of current debates about self and identity—and what does Kierkegaard have to teach philosophers grappling with these problems today? The Naked Self explores Kierkegaard's understanding of selfhood by situating his work in relation to central problems in contemporary philosophy of personal identity: the role of memory in selfhood, the relationship between the notional and actual subjects of memory and anticipation, the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience, affective alienation from our past and future, psychological continuity, practical and narrative approaches to identity, and the intelligibility of posthumous survival. By bringing his thought into dialogue with major living and recent philosophers of identity (such as Derek Parfit, Galen Strawson, Bernard Williams, J. David Velleman, Marya Schechtman, Mark Johnston, and others), Stokes reveals Kierkegaard as a philosopher with a significant—if challenging—contribution to make to philosophy of self and identity. |
Contents
Kierkegaard and the History of the Self | |
Recollection and Memory | |
Contemporaneity | |
Perspectival Subjectivity | |
Diachronicity Episodicity Synchronicity | |
Selfalienation | |
Continuity and Temporality | |
Practical and Narrative Identity | |
Survival and Eschatology | |
Objections and Future Directions | |
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Common terms and phrases
actions actual subject aesthete alienation answer Anti-Climacus anticipation appropriation argued believer Chapter character claim concept consciousness constituted Davenport despair diachronic self-experience diachronically extended discussion distinction doesn’t Either/Or episodic memory eschatological essential eternal ethical existence experience experiential extended consciousness fact first-person perspective fission fission products future person-stages Galen Strawson human identify imagination important individual Johan Ludvig Heiberg Johannes Climacus Judge William judgement Kierkegaard Kierkegaardian contemporaneity lives Locke Locke’s means merely metaphysical moral narrative identity narrativists neo-Lockean nonetheless normative notional subject object one’s oneself ontology ourselves Parfit past and future persistence personal identity perspectival phenomenal property phenomenology philosophical possibility present present-tense problem pseudonym psychological continuity question recollection reflexive relation remember remorse responsibility Rudd samtidighed Schechtman seems self-constitution self-reflexive self-relation selfhood sense Sickness Unto Death simply sort soteriological soul Strawson survival temporal things thought UDVS ultimately understanding Velleman visual Wollheim Young Russian