Download or read book Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility written by Linda Ethell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility is about why and how identifying ourselves by means of narrative makes it possible for us to be responsible, morally and otherwise. The book begins as an investigation into how it is that we can hold people responsible for who they are, despite the fact that we have almost no control over our lives in our formative years. It explains the relation between representation, personal identity, and self-knowledge, demonstrating how awareness of the vulnerability of our identity as persons is the origin of our capacity for the cathartic revision of a self-identifying narrative which is the condition of moral awareness. Innovative in its interdisciplinary juxtaposition of ethics, moral psychology, literary theory and literature, Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility develops a sophisticated and comprehensive account of human nature. This book offers an intuitively satisfying and humane yet rigorous account of why and how we think of ourselves as simultaneously free and constrained by nature. Its fundamental thesis, the mediation of narrative representation between agent and the world, suggests new answers to old problems in moral psychology, such as the question of free will and responsibility. With a more literary style than many philosophy texts, it works through a series of interconnected problems of as much interest to a thoughtful layperson as to academic philosophers.

Download or read book Personal Identity and Ethics written by David Shoemaker and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2008-10-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between personal identity and ethics remains on of the most intriguing yet vexing issues in philosophy. It is commonplace to hold that moral responsibility for past actions requires that the responsible agent is in some respect identical to the agent who performed the action. Is this true? On the other hand, can ethics constrain our account of personal identity? Do the practical requirements of moral theory commit us to the view that persons do remain identical over time? For example, does the moral status of abortion or stem cell research depend on whether personal identity is based on psychological or biological properties? Or is it the case that personal identity is not, in fact, relevant to ethics? Personal Identity and Ethics provides the first comprehensive examination of these issues. Topics include personal identity and prudential rationality; personal identity’s significance for moral responsibility and ethical theory; and the practical consequences of accounts of personal identity for issues such as abortion, stem cell research, cloning, advance directives, population ethics, multiple personality disorder, and the definition of death.

Download or read book Narrative Identity Autonomy and Mortality written by John J. Davenport and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two decades, interest in narrative conceptions of identity has grown exponentially, though there is little agreement about what a "life-narrative" might be. In connecting Kierkegaard with virtue ethics, several scholars have recently argued that narrative models of selves and MacIntyre's concept of the unity of a life help make sense of Kierkegaard's existential stages and, in particular, explain the transition from "aesthetic" to "ethical" modes of life. But others have recently raised difficult questions both for these readings of Kierkegaard and for narrative accounts of identity that draw on the work of MacIntyre in general. While some of these objections concern a strong kind of unity or "wholeheartedness" among an agent's long-term goals or cares, the fundamental objection raised by critics is that personal identity cannot be a narrative, since stories are artifacts made by persons. In this book, Davenport defends the narrative approach to practical identity and autonomy in general, and to Kierkegaard's stages in particular.

Download or read book Narrative Identity and Moral Identity written by Kim Atkins and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2010-11-03 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is part of the growing field of practical approaches to philosophical questions relating to identity, agency and ethics--approaches which work across continental and analytical traditions and which Atkins justifies through an explication of how the structures of human embodiment necessitate a narrative model of selfhood, understanding, and ethics.

Download or read book Paul Ricoeur s Moral Anthropology written by Geoffrey Dierckxsens and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-12-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Ricœur’s Moral Anthropology is a guide for readers who are interested in Paul Ricœur’s thoughts on morals in general, bringing together the different aspects of what Geoffrey Dierckxsens understands as Ricœur’s moral anthropology. This anthropology addresses the question what it means to be human, capable of participating in moral life. Dierckxsens argues that Ricœur shows that this participation implies being a self, living a singular lived existence with others and being responsible in institutions of justice. Through experiencing life one comes to learn taking moral decisions and the reasons for moral life. The wager of Ricœur’s hermeneutical approach to moral anthropology is—so Dierckxsens argues—to understand moral life on the basis of the interpretation of lived existence, rather than on the basis of cultural or natural patterns only, like many contemporary moral theories in analytical philosophy. Ricœur’s moral anthropology is thus particularly timely in that it offers a critical argument against contemporary moral relativism and reductionism. By bringing together Ricœur’s moral anthropology, and recent moral theories this book offers a novel perspective on Ricœur’s already well-established moral theory. Dierckxsens moreover offers a critical perspective by arguing that we should revisit certain moral concepts in Ricœur’s moral anthropology and in contemporary moral theories in analytical philosophy. He evaluates certain concepts in Ricœur’s work, such as the concept of universal moral norms and how it stands against cultural differences in morals. He moreover interrogates certain ideas of contemporary analytical philosophy, such as the idea of cultural moral relativism and whether we can find a common morality across the cultural differences. By placing Ricœur’s ideas on moral life within the context of the contemporary scene of moral theory, this book contributes well to Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricœur.

Download or read book Holding and Letting Go written by Hilde Lindemann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the social practice of holding each other in our identities, beginning with pregnancy and on through the life span. Lindemann argues that our identities give us our sense of how to act and how to treat others, and that the ways in which we we hold each other in them is of crucial moral importance.

Download or read book Narrative Identity written by Pierluca Birindelli and published by FrancoAngeli. This book was released on 2023-02-01T00:00:00+01:00 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1520.829

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Identity Development written by Kate C. McLean and published by Oxford Library of Psychology. This book was released on 2015 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identity is defined in many different ways in various disciplines in the social sciences and sub-disciplines within psychology. The developmental psychological approach to identity is characterized by a focus on developing a sense of the self that is temporally continuous and unified across the different life spaces that individuals inhabit. Erikson proposed that the task of adolescence and young adulthood was to define the self by answering the question: Who Am I? There have been many advances in theory and research on identity development since Erikson's writing over fifty years ago, and the time has come to consolidate our knowledge and set an agenda for future research. The Oxford Handbook of Identity Development represents a turning point in the field of identity development research. Various, and disparate, groups of researchers are brought together to debate, extend, and apply Erikson's theory to contemporary problems and empirical issues. The result is a comprehensive and state-of-the-art examination of identity development that pushes the field in provocative new directions. Scholars of identity development, adolescent and adult development, and related fields, as well as graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and practitioners will find this to be an innovative, unique, and exciting look at identity development.

Download or read book Introducing Narrative Psychology written by Michele Crossley and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2000-02-16 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * What is narrative psychology? * How is the experience of 'self' linked to language, narratives and other people? * What is the role of time, morality, power and control in the construction of identity? This introductory textbook presents a coherent overview of the theory, methodology and potential application of narrative psychological approaches. It compares narrative psychology with other social constructionist approaches and argues that the experience of self only takes on meaning through specific linguistic, historical and social structures. The author shows how the choice of one narrative over another - for example arising out of dominant narrative structures of power and control - can have serious social and psychological implications for the construction of images of self, responsibility, blame and morality. Theoretical approaches are introduced and an overview of methods is provided, encouraging individuals to apply these theories to their own autobiographies. Such theories are further illustrated with case-study material drawing on physical illness (HIV infection) and childhood sexual abuse. Each of these issues is examined in a way which demonstrates how different contemporary narratives and discourses are used to construct meaning and a sense of coherent identity in the face of traumatic events which break down temporal coherence and order. Taken as a whole, this book represents essential reading for students and researchers interested in narrative psychology.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Self written by Shaun Gallagher and published by OUP UK. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 759 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Self explores a fascinating diversity of questions about our understanding of self from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, ethics, psychology, neuroscience, psychopathology, narrative, and postmodern theories.

Download or read book Tadeusz R ewicz and Modern Identity in Poland since the Second World War written by Wojciech Browarny and published by Projekt Nauka. Fundacja na rzecz promocji nauki polskiej. This book was released on 2019-04-10 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Andrzej Mencwel observed, “as a result of fundamental historical changes” the need arises for “restructuring of the whole present memory and tradition system” (Rodzinna Europa po raz pierwszy). Changes of such significance took place in Poland during the Second World War and several following decades. Collective experience of that time was made up of – apart from political antagonisms – social and cultural phenomena such as change of elites, reinterpretation of their grand narratives (or symbolic world), the ultimate inclusion of the masses into the national project based on the post-gentry tradition and national history, the intensive development of urban lifestyle and the expansion of popular culture, industrialization and the process of forming a single-nationality state that diverted from the politics of domination over eastern neighbors and, instead, focused on developing the so-called Polish Western and Northern Lands. Tadeusz Różewicz’s work referred to these experiences on both the intellectual and biographical level. Comparing Juliusz Mieroszewski’s political journalism with Tadeusz Różewicz’s works, Andrzej Mencwel stressed its unique relationship of the author of Niepokój. According to him, both writers were writing as though “they had truly experienced the end of the world” (Przedwiośnie czy potop. Studium postaw polskich w XX wieku). In the afterword to the German anthology of Różewicz’s works, Karl Dedecius mentioned “Stunde Null” (“hour zero”) as the founding experience of his writing. It was this experience that induced him to undertake the challenge of attempting a new collective and national as well as individual self-identification, searching for a radically new way of thinking and writing about man, and verifying the essential components of his identity. Andrzej Walicki called this urge “the catastrophism after a catastrophe”, explaining that “once the catastrophe took place, a ca- tastrophist acknowledging its inevitability must think about ‘a new beginning’, about determining his own place in a new world” (Zniewolony umysł po latach). Hanna Gosk specifies that “it gave rise to situations when the necessity of discovering one’s place in new geographical, social, axiological and world-view-related environment urged self-identification” (Bohater swoich czasów. Postać literacka w powojennej prozie polskiej o tematyce współczesnej). It must be stressed that the need for re-establishing the sense of identity, resulting from a major crisis, was by no means limited to the postwar artistic and political elites. On the contrary, due to social changes and democratization of the access to national culture, it concerned more than ever in the past the “everyman” who did not belong to one class solely: the intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, peasantry, or proletariat but, most often, represented multiple social rooting. Tadeusz Różewicz, alongside with writers such as Tadeusz Borowski, Marek Hłasko or Miron Białoszewski, made the “Polish everyman” (Tadeusz Drewnowski) the central figure of his work. This study discusses the modern identity of an individual in Poland in two variants: a cultured man with traditions and an ordinary, transitional, temporal, or “new”, man. By adopting the narrativist approach, identity can be described through its articulations in culture, for example in literary texts. Analyzing methods of modern identification and self-awareness throughout this book, I try to prove that prose works of the author of Śmierć w starych dekoracjach present an extensive, interesting and diverse material in the matter. When necessary, I refer also to his dramatic works and poetry, especially to some longer poems published after 1989. The author’s most important prose works have so far been written in the first 30-year period starting from his debut volume of partisan novellas, notes and humorous sketches Echa leśne mimeographed in 1944. While focusing on this period, I also analyze later works published in collections Nasz starszy brat and Matka odchodzi published in the last decade of the 20th century, although written at an earlier date. Różewicz’s prose works analyzed here were published predominantly in the threevolume edition of Utwory zebrane in 2003/2004, in the reportage collection entitled Kartki z Węgier (1953) as well as in the collection of newspapers features, letters and notes – written in the 60s. and 70s. in most cases – entitled Margines, ale… (2010). I also make use of the earlier editions of his works, containing prose works not included in Utwory zebrane, for example, from the volume Opadły liście z drzew, as well as of some narratives published in journals and anthologies. Conversations with the writer published in Wbrew sobie. Rozmowy z Tadeuszem Różewiczem (2011) and his letters to Jerzy and Zofia Nowosielscy included in Korespondencja comprise an auxiliary material. What specifically draws my attention in Tadeusz Różewicz’s prose? I read his works in the context of identity narratives manifest in culture and historical-biographical stories. The questions then arise about their formative influence on an individual: what within them presents a reference for the “self ” seeking identification? When and how does individual experience take on an intersubjective meaning? Under what circumstances is it expressed in the public sphere? Have new identification patterns emerged in the Polish modernity, and if so, then what fields and phenomena of the 20th century culture or history have taken on such model significance? How and where were boundaries drawn be tween what is individual in an identity of a person speaking and thinking in Polish on the one hand, and, on the other, what is collective? What has been considered native in this identity, and what alien – for exam­ple Western, bourgeois, communist, German, Jewish, non-normative in terms of religion or sexuality – and in what way has cultural “otherness” been constructed at that time? Trying to answer these questions, I refer to categories of cultural anthropology such as symbolic universe, collective memory, autobiographical identity, body and space in culture, as well as to notions from the social sciences – interpersonal relationship, public discourse and communicative community. To put it simply, using these categories I try to describe the most important narrative forms and topics of Różewicz’s prose that allow the writer to address and express in a liter­ary form identity problems faced by an individual and the community. I also attempt to analyze the very proces through which Różewicz devel­ops his own unique identity narratives as well as the evolution of narra­tive conventions of his literary work. Reading Różewicz’s works in this manner and organizing chapters of this book from the ones presenting public identity (displayed publicly and codified in ideology or aesthetic) to the ones presenting private identity, I put an especial emphasis on some issues related to cultural studies and social communication. Ac­cording to the reconstruction model, I assume that even private experi­ences shape one’s identity through culture and language. In Różewicz’s narratives I describe and compare both more collective and more indi­vidual premises for constructing identity. The criterion for differentiating between these premises is determined by the narrativist approach adopt­ed in this book. An individual’s identity (even autobiographical one) is created and expressed within the existing culture and public sphere, and for this reason I am interested in history of ideas, in social relationships, symbols and role models, changes of customs and everyday life which left a distinct impression on literary, political or historical narratives. Reading these narratives, I make use of the following authors: Jan Assmann, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Ernst Cassirer, Michel Foucault, Marc Fumaroli, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jerzy Jedlicki, Anthony Giddens, Iz­abela Kowalczyk, Philippe Lejeune, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanisław Ossowski, Ewa Rewers, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty, Elżbieta Rybicka, Richard Shusterman, Georg Simmel, Jerzy Szacki, Magdalena Środa, Charles Taylor, Nikodem Bończa Tomaszewski, Christian Vandendorpe, Anna Wieczorkiewicz. I rely on their reconstruction of social-historical background of modern identity presented by these authors as well as on language used by them. The book structure results from the overlapping, or even conflict, of two research objectives. My task is to analyze the most important prem­ises and forms of identity in Różewicz’s prose, and I describe them in separate chapters as problems of culture, literature and history of ideas as well as models and social projects. It is my wish that all these perspectives make up a coherent identity narrative of man of the second half of the 20th century – a “biographical” case study. The study covers the pro­cess of political empowerment of an individual; his/her participation in democratized mass culture; his/her attitude towards collective memory, towards Polish and European cultural community; experiencing of body, sexuality and everyday existence; emotional and social relationship with space; and, finally, an autobiographical identity which I reconstruct as a transitional and provisional “whole”. One of the most significant issues covered in the book is the western orientation of Polish collective identity in the 20th century, related to the modernization of Central Europe and the postwar division of the continent by the Iron Curtain, which created in Poland a phantom idea of the West, as well as to the shifted borders of the Polish state to the territories by the Odra river and the Baltic Sea, to polonization of former German lands, and, finally, to historical and polit­ical discourse legitimizing this transfer of territories. Tadeusz Różewicz as a travelling writer and journalist has relentlessly problematized the relationship between Europe and its Polish idea; as a resident in Gliwice and Wrocław, not only has he described – since the trip down the Odra river on a fishing boat from Koźle to Szczecin in 1947 – symbolic colonization of the post- German Nadodrze, but also artistically diagnosed the birth of the new individual and social identity of the inhabitants of this border area, with its clashing narratives of history, biography and national literature alongside the overlapping traces of different cultures and traditions. Writing about Różewicz’s man in this book, I clearly do not mean the writer himself. It is obvious that among many convictions and attitudes that the author of Sobowtór manifests, there are some of which he is fond, and there are others of which he is not. I do not disregard his views voiced in non-fiction narratives and public speeches, yet I am mostly interested in experience, world view and self-comprehension of his literary persona and literary hero presented or partially derived from an idea of man and of community in his texts. Analyzing Różewicz’s works, I therefore distinguish between his self-evident journalistic approach and his humanistic reflection which is a result of a philosophical or literary presentation of identity problems an individual faces. I read his prose as an element of a public discourse and at the same time as an indirect – formulated in fictional, intimate or notebook narratives – criticism of social reality and European culture in the 20th century. In most cases, I leave open questions such as whether or not Różewicz was or is committed to a specific political project; whether or not he is a modern man in different meanings of this notion; whether or not his personal identity coincides with identity narratives in his books. Finding an answer to these questions is not a purpose of this book. It is, distinctively, the problem of Tadeusz Różewicz’s intellectual commitment to modern culture, literature and history and a problem of the writer’s role in creative and critical understanding of them that I find more interesting and important.

Download or read book Emotions and Personhood written by Giovanni Stanghellini and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-02-07 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotions and personhood are important notions within the field of mental health care. How they are related is less evident. This book provides a framework for understanding the important and complex relationship between our emotional wellbeing and our sense of self, drawing on psychopathology, philosophy, and phenomenology.

Download or read book Narrative Identities written by George Yancy and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors address challenging questions about identity in relation to personality development, language and socialisation. They demonstrate how their cultural and historical contexts influenced their theoretical approaches to the nature of self' and how these ideas in turn shaped how they perceive their personal histories.

Download or read book Self Constitution written by Christine M. Korsgaard and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christine M. Korsgaard presents an account of the foundation of practical reason and moral obligation, based on a new theory of action and interaction. She proposes that the function of an action is to constitute the agency and therefore the identity of the person who does it, and that only morally good action can serve this function. -;Christine M. Korsgaard presents an account of the foundation of practical reason and moral obligation. Moral philosophy aspires to understand the fact that human actions, unlike the actions of the other animals, can be morally good or bad, right or wrong. Few moral philosophers, however, have exploited the idea that actions might be morally good or bad in virtue of being good or bad of their kind - good or bad as actions. Just as we need to know that it is the function of the. heart to pump blood to know that a good heart is one that pumps blood successfully, so we need to know what the function of an action is in order to know what counts as a good or bad action. Drawing on the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, Korsgaard proposes that the function of an action is to. constitute the agency and therefore the identity of the person who does it. As rational beings, we are aware of, and therefore in control of, the principles that govern our actions. A good action is one that constitutes its agent as the autonomous and efficacious cause of her own movements. These properties correspond, respectively, to Kant's two imperatives of practical reason. Conformity to the categorical imperative renders us autonomous, and conformity to the hypothetical imperative. renders us efficacious. And in determining what effects we will have in the world, we are at the same time determining our own identities. Korsgaard develops a theory of action and of interaction, and of the form interaction must take if we are to have the integrity that, she argues, is essential for. agency. On the basis of that theory, she argues that only morally good action can serve the function of action, which is self-constitution. -

Download or read book Subjects of Substance written by Julian Henneberg and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2020-07-31 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent U.S. literature has both been informed by, and critically engaged with, materialist conceptions of selfhood. Over the past decades, disciplines like neuroscience and evolutionary biology have increasingly recast the human self as a malleable construct produced by physiological processes. In a parallel development, literary authors have created their own conceptions of somatic subjectivity in conjunction or contrast with scientific and medical discourses. Subjects of Substance examines the forms, functions, and effects of materialist models of mind in selected memoirs and novels. Authors discussed include Michael W. Clune, Don DeLillo, Kay Redfield Jamison, Siri Hustvedt, Richard Powers, Elyn R. Saks, and David Foster Wallace.

Download or read book The Situation and the Story written by Vivian Gornick and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2002-10-11 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras. This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

Download or read book Play it Again Cover Songs in Popular Music written by Professor George Plasketes and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering—the musical practice of one artist recording or performing another composer's song—has always been an attribute of popular music. In 2009, the internet database Second Hand Songs estimated that there are 40,000 songs with at least one cover version. Some of the more common variations of this "appropriationist" method of musical quotation include traditional forms such as patriotic anthems, religious hymns such as Amazing Grace, Muzak's instrumental interpretations, Christmas classics, and children's songs. Novelty and comedy collections from parodists such as Weird Al Yankovic also align in the cover category, as does the "larcenous art" of sampling, and technological variations in dance remixes and mash-ups. Film and television soundtracks and advertisers increasingly rely on versions of familiar pop tunes to assist in marketing their narratives and products. The cover phenomenon in popular culture may be viewed as a postmodern manifestation in music as artists revisit, reinterpret and re-examine a significant cross section of musical styles, periods, genres, individual records, and other artists and their catalogues of works.The cover complex, with its multiple variations, issues, contexts, and re-contextualizations comprises an important and rich popular culture text. These re-recordings represent artifacts which embody artistic, social, cultural, historical, commercial, biographical, and novel meanings. Through homage, allusion, apprenticeship, and parody, among other modes, these diverse musical quotations express, preserve, and distribute popular culture, popular music and their intersecting historical narratives. Play it Again represents the first collection of critical perspectives on the many facets of cover songs in popular music.