Continental Philosophy

A review of Narrative Identity and Moral Identity: A Practical Perspective

Narrative conceptions of agency have attracted considerable philosophical interest in recent years, and both of these books make significant contributions to the growing literature on this theme. Each treats a wide range of related concepts, including not just narrative agency itself but also personal and practical identity, temporality and the self, practical reasoning, and autonomy.

Kim Atkins’ Narrative Identity and Moral Identity is a book about the nature of human selfhood. Atkins uses the terms “selfhood” and “identity” interchangeably, and approaches her subject in part through a discussion of theories of personal identity. Her central interest, however, is in practical rather than metaphysical identity. A person, in the sense of interest to Atkins, is a practical unity of first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives (more on this below), and questions about personal identity, in her sense, are questions about the continuity of this practical unity over time.

Rest of the review

Dan Zahavi, the known phenomenologist, has many of his artciles and book chapters as pdf on his own site.

Link

What is a Political Event? — Iain MacKenzie

Transgression as a specific form of enjoyment in the criollo world — Gonzalo Portocarrero

The Horror of Self-Reflection: The Concealment of Violence in a “Self-Conscious and Critical Society” — Roberto Farneti

Law, Grace, and Race: The Political Theology of Manderlay — Vincent Lloyd

Empire, Tragedy, and the Liberal State in the Writings of Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff — Jeanne Morefield

Politics and Connolly’s Ethics: Immigrant Narratives, Racism, and Identity’s Contingency — Paul Apostolidis

One day, the gods retreated. On their own, they retreated from their divinity, that is to say, from their presence. What remains of their presence is what remains of all presence when it absents itself: what remains is what one can say about it. What can be said about it is what remains when one can no longer address it: neither speak to it, nor touch it, nor see it, nor give it a present.

(One might even say that the gods retreated because one no longer gives a present to their presence: no more sacrifice, no more oblation, except by way of custom or imitation. One has other things to do: write, for example, calculate, do business, legislate. Deprived of presents, presence has retreated.)

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Nietzsche wrote that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher. Maybe a biography of the philosopher by the philosopher himself is a piece of philosophy. So I shall tell you nine stories taken of my private life, with their philosophical morality… The first story is the story of the father and the mother.

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Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy — Author: Paul Guyer

Comments on Guyer — Author: Allen W. Wood

Comments on Guyer — Author: Henry E. Allison

Comments on Guyer — Author: Sebastian Rödl

Response to Critics — Author: Paul Guyer

Knowing at Second Hand — Author: Benjamin McMyler

Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Narrative Unity – Reply to Lippitt — Author: Anthony Rudd

Alex points out that the first chapter of Wendy Brown’s Politics Out of Historyis available from the publisher.

Link

Carolyn Jess-Cooke, University of Sunderland, UK

A recent surge of films depicting memory have indicated the increasing prominence of memory narratives in the public sphere. [1] Although memory has occupied film as a major thematic interest since modernity, the cinematic treatment of memory and amnesia has altered significantly throughout the course of the last few years, particularly in terms of memory’s operation in media spaces. The focus of this essay is therefore on “mediatized” memory, or the notion of a collective, mediated memory narrative through which the past can be re-experienced, and by which processes of memorialization can be socially organized as visual events. Mediatized memories are filmed, televised, or digitally-rendered reproductions of the past which create a collective mnemic reality that reproduces the past to the extent that the “real” event is displaced from public memory. Consequently, a mediatized memory re-constructs a past that is “deprived of its substance” (Žižek, 2002: 11). As Slavoj Žižek puts it,

[t]he authentic twentieth-century passion for penetrating the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate “effect”, sought after from digitalized special effects, through reality TV and amateur photography, up to snuff movies (Žižek, 2002: 12).

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The Paradox of Beginning: Hegel, Kierkegaard and Philosophical Inquiry — Daniel Watts

Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative — John Lippitt

Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: The Immediacy of Moral Vision — Patrick Stokes

The Comically Infinite Man — Michelle Grier

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading Heidegger Backwards: White’s Time and Death — Iain Thomson

(Hat tip: Long Sunday)

Also of possible interest:

Derrida visits Nelson Mandela’s Jail Cell.