Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Self, Self-Awareness, Self-Reference

  • The Man in the Mirror and Belief De Se

    The following can happen.  You see yourself but without self-recognition.  You see yourself, but not as yourself.  Suppose you walk into a room which, unbeknownst to you, has a mirror covering the far wall.  You are slightly alarmed to see a wild-haired man with his fly open approaching you.  You are looking at yourself but you…

  • Do We Love the Person or Only Her Attributes?

    Substack latest. Gleanings from a passage from Pascal. This supplements and deepens the recent discussion of subjective and objective views of death.

  • Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism . . .

    . . . and whether the self is an illusion. Top o' the Stack.

  • The Christian ‘Anatta Doctrine’ of Lorenzo Scupoli

    Buddhism and Christianity both enjoin what I will call moral self-denial. But Buddhism is more radical in that it connects moral self-denial with metaphysical self-denial. Thus Buddhism denies the very existence of the self, whereas Christianity in its orthodox versions presupposes the existence of the self: Christian self-purification falls short of eliminativism about the self.…

  • Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove?

    Retorsion (retortion) is the philosophical procedure whereby one attempts to establish a thesis by uncovering a performative inconsistency in anyone who denies it. It is as old as Aristotle and has been put to use by philosophers as diverse as Transcendental Thomists and Ayn Rand and her followers. Retorsion is something like an ad hominem tu quoque except…

  • Body, Soul, Self

      Tony Flood writes: Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question. Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God…

  • I Know My Limits

    I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know.   Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible.  (Note how 'I' is used above.  It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is…

  • Ernst Mach and the Shabby Pedagogue: On Belief De Se

    1. In The Analysis of Sensations (Dover, 1959, p. 4, n. 1) Ernst Mach (1838-1916) offers the following anecdote:      Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night, when I was     very tired, I got into an omnibus, just as another man appeared at     the other end. 'What a shabby pedagogue that is, that…

  • A Discussion with Lukas Novak about Transcendental Idealism and the Transcendental Ego

    The extended comment thread below began life in the comments to Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? (13 October 2020) ……………………….. Dear Bill, You have exactly nailed my fundamental problem with transcendental idealism by this: What is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist?…

  • Ruminations on the Dative of Disclosure

    Steven Nemes comments on my long Husserl entry: [Robert] Sokolowski’s reflections in his Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2000) are also helpful. He maintains that the transcendental ego is not substantially different than the empirical ego. In other words, the transcendental ego is not some different substance from the empirical ego, i.e. the [animated]…

  • Ideals and Non-Attachment

    Self-mastery, you say, is the highest mastery. You are attached to this ideal and you live for the most part in accordance with it. But on occasion you stumble and fall. You lose your temper, overeat, or succumb to lust. And then you feel disgust with yourself. The failure hurts your ego. It diminishes your…

  • The Riddle of the Self

    Jacques comments: I like your reply to the reader who asked about the existence of the self.  All good points!  I wonder what you think about the following different response to people like Harris (or Hume)…  It seems to me that they just don't adequately support their claim that no self can be known or…

  • Is There a Self? A Reader Requests Reassurance

    A reader reports that he has recently gone through "a season of depression and extreme anxiety" and has come to doubt what he hitherto believed to be true, namely that there is a self.  He now fears that Sam Harris may be right in the following passage I quote in Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism…

  • Four Types of Ontological Egalitarianism

    There are egalitarians in ontology as there are in political theory. Herewith, four types of ontological egalitarianism: egological, spatial, temporal, and modal. Egological egalitarianism is the view  there is a plurality of equally real selves.  I take it we are all egological egalitarians in sane moments. I'll assume that no one reading this thinks, solipsistically,…

  • Lecturer on Personal Identity Denied Honorarium

    The members of the philosophy department were so convinced by the lecturer's case against diachronic personal identity that they refused to pay him his honorarium on the ground that the potential recipient could not be the same person as the lecturer. This from a piece by Stanley Hauerwas: It is by no means clear to me…