Religious Studies
Self or No-Self?
The Debate about Selflessness and the Sense of Self. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2015
Ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Trevor W. Kimball
[Selbst oder Nicht-Selbst. Die Debatte um Selbstlosigkeit und die Rede vom Selbst. Claremont Studien zur Religionsphilosophie, Konferenz 2015.]
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Published in English.
Religious, philosophical, and theological views on the self vary widely. For some the self is seen as the center of human personhood, the ultimate bearer of personal identity and the core mystery of human existence. For others the self is a grammatical error and the sense of self an existential and epistemic delusion. Buddhists contrast the Western understanding of the self as a function of the mind that helps us to organize our experiences to their view of no-self by distinguishing between no-self and not-self or between a solid or 'metaphysical' self that is an illusion and an experiential or psychological self that is not. There may be processes of 'selfing', but there is no permanent self. In Western psychology, philosophy, and theology, on the other hand, the term 'self' is often used as a noun that refers not to the performance of an activity or to a material body per se but rather to a (gendered) organism that represents the presence of something distinct from its materiality. Is this a defensible insight or a misleading representation of human experience? We are aware of ourselves in the first-person manner of our ipse -identity that cannot fully be spelled out in objectifying terms, but we also know ourselves in the third-person manner of our idem -identity, the objectified self-reference to a publicly available entity. This volume documents a critical and constructive debate between critics and defenders of the self or of the no-self that explores the intercultural dimensions of this important topic.Survey of contents
PrefaceIngolf U. Dalferth: Introduction: The Debate about Self and Selflessness
I. The Making of the Self through Language
Ingolf U. Dalferth: Situated Selves in »Webs of Interlocution«: What Can We Learn from Grammar? – Marlene Block: God, Grammar and the Truing of the Self: A Response to Ingolf Dalferth
II. The European Legacy
Joseph S. O'Leary: The Self and the One in Plotinus – Marcelo Souza: A Question of Continuity: A Response to Joseph S. O'Leary – W. Ezekiel Goggin: Selfhood and Sacrifice in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit – Iben Damgaard: Kierkegaard on Self and Selflessness in Critical Dialogue with MacIntyre's, Taylor's and Ricoeur's Narrative Approach to the Self – Raymond Perrier: The Grammar of 'Self': Immediacy and Mediation in Either/Or: A Response to Iben Damgaard
III. The Self in Modernity
Kate Kirkpatrick: 'A Perpetually Deceptive Mirage': Jean-Paul Sartre and Blaise Pascal on the Sinful (No-)Self – Eleonora Mingarelli: »It is no longer I who lives…« William James and the Process of De-selving – Stephanie Gehring: After the Will: Attention and Selfhood in Simone Weil – Joseph Prabhu: The Self in Modernity-a Diachronic and Cross-Cultural Critique – Friederike Rass: The Divine in Modernity: A Theological Tweak on Joseph Prabhu's Critique of the Modern Self
IV. Self and No-Self in Asian Traditions
Alexander McKinley: No Self or Ourselves? Wittgenstein and Language Games of Selfhood in a Sinhala Buddhist Form of Life – Jonardon Ganeri: Core Selves and Dynamic Attentional Centering: Between Buddhaghose and Brian O'Shaughnessy – Leah Kalmanson: Like You Mean It: Buddhist Teachings on Selflessness, Sincerity, and the Performative Practice of Liberation – Fidel Arnecillo, Jr.: Worrisome Implications of a Buddhist View of Selflessness and Moral Action: A Response to Leah Kalmanson – Gereon Kopf: Self, selflessness, and the endless search for identity: a meta-psychology of Human Folly – Deena Lin: Probing Identity: Challenging Essentializations of the Self in Ontology. A Response to Gereon Kopf – Sinkwan Cheng: Aristotle, Confucius, and a New »Right« to Connect China to Europe: What Concepts of »Self« and »Right« We Might Have without the Christian Notion of Original Sin – Robert Overy-Brown: Right Translation and Making Right: A Response to Sinkwan Cheng
V. The End of the Self
Dietrich Korsch: The »Fragility of the Self« and the Immortality of the Soul – Trevor Kimball: Fragile Immortality: A Response to Dietrich Korsch – Yuval Avnur: On Losing Your Self in Your Afterlife – Duncan Gale: Self-Awareness in the Afterlife: A Response to Yuval Avnur