Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Self, Self-Awareness, Self-Reference

  • On the Separation and Attachment of Soul and Body

    I was purchasing shotgun ammo at a gun store a while back.  The proprietor brought out a box of double-aught buckshot shells which he recommended as having "the power to separate the soul from the body."  The proprietor was a 'good old boy,' not someone with whom  a wise man initiates a philosophical discussion.  But his colorful…

  • Wittgenstein and Butchvarov on the Self

    This entry supplements the earlier entry on what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus calls the metaphysical subject. (5.633)  Wittgenstein As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world.  "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas."…

  • The Metaphysical Subject :Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.63

      I take Wittgenstein to be saying at 5.63 that the seeing eye is not in the visual field.  I can of course see my eyes via a mirror.  But these are seen eyes, not seeing eyes.  The eyes I see in the mirror are objects of visual consciousness; they are not what do the…

  • Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity

    From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox.  Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism discussed by Butchvarov, as I construe it, the numbers in parentheses being page references to his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only…

  • The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov’s Solution

    In his highly  original Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism (Walter de Gruyter 2015)  Panayot Butchvarov argues that philosophy in its three main branches, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, needs to be freed from its anthropocentrism. Philosophy ought to be “dehumanized.” This entry will examine how Butchvarov proposes to dehumanize metaphysics.  These Butchvarov posts are exercises toward…

  • Personal and Impersonal Uses of the First-Person Singular Pronoun

    Panayot Butchvarov in his latest book claims that the first-person singular pronoun as it functions in such typical philosophical contexts as the Cartesian cogito is "a dangling pronoun, a pronoun without an antecedent noun."  (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 40)  In this entry I will try to understand and…

  • A ‘No’ to ‘No Self’

    Dale Tuggy is in town and we met up  on Thursday and Friday.  On Good Friday morning I took him on a fine looping traipse in the Western Superstitions out of First Water trail head to Second Water trail to Garden Valley, down to Hackberry Spring, and then back to the Second Water trail via…

  • Nothing is Written in Stone

    The curiosity to the left, sent to me without commentary by the inscrutable and seldom seen Seldom Seen Slim, raises a number of deep and fascinating questions. The sentence to the left can be read either literally or metaphorically. My analysis in this entry is concerned with a literal reading only. 1. If nothing is…

  • Sophistry in True Detective: On the Supposed Illusion of Having a Self

    The other day I referred to the following bit of dialogue from the new HBO series, True Detective, as sophistry. Now I will explain why I think it to be such.  Here is the part I want to focus on.  The words are put in the mouth of the anti-natalist Rustin Cohle.  I've ommitted the…

  • Guilt and Identity

    Can I assuage my feelings of guilt over a long past misdeed by telling myself that I was a different person then?  Not very well.  I was different all right, but not numerically. One could try to soften strict numerical identity of a person over time by adopting a bundle theory of diachronic personal identity. …

  • *Every Proposition is Affirmative*

    Nicholas Rescher cites this example from Buridan.  The proposition is false, but not self-refuting.  If every proposition is affirmative, then of course *Every proposition is affirmative* is affirmative.  The self-reference seems innocuous, a case of self-instantiation. But *Every proposition is affirmative* has as a logical consequence *No proposition is negative.*  This follows by Obversion, assuming…

  • More on the Supposed Non-Existence of the Self

    Peter Lupu e-mails: In your recent post criticizing Harris' argument against the self (which is already present in Hume) you point out that the argument against the self is lacking. It is lacking, you argue, because from the mere fact that the self is not revealed in certain types of introspective experiences it does not…

  • Sam Harris on Rational Mysticism and Whether the Self is an Illusion

    London Karl brings to my attention an article by Sam Harris touching upon themes dear to my heart. Harris is an impressive fellow, an excellent public speaker, a crusader of sorts who has some important and true things to say, but who is sometimes out beyond his depth, like many public intellectuals who make bold…

  • The Self as Center of Narrative Gravity?

    According to the The New York Times, Daniel Dennett has a new book coming out entitled Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.  Here are a couple of tidbits from the NYT piece: The self? Simply a “center of narrative gravity,” a convenient fiction that allows us to integrate various neuronal data streams. The elusive…

  • More on my Non-Identity With My Living Body

    Maximilian J. Nightingale writes: You laid out this syllogism in a recent post: My living body will  become a dead body;  I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am  not identical to a living body. It seems to me that if "becoming" means the same thing in both the first and the second…