The Philosopher's "I"

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The Philosopher's "I"
Autobiography and the Search for the Self

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J. Lenore Wright - Author

Price: $74.50
Hardcover - 228 pages

Release Date: October 2006

ISBN10: 0-7914-6913-1
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6913-2

Price: $26.95
Paperback - 228 pages

Release Date: October 2006

ISBN10: 0-7914-6914-X
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-6914-9

Summary

Using works written over the course of 1,500 years, considers philosophers’ autobiographies as a genre of philosophical writing.

This book examines philosophers’ autobiographies as a genre of philosophical writing. Author J. Lenore Wright focuses her attention on five philosophical autobiographies: Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’ Meditations, Rousseau’s The Confessions, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, and Hazel Barnes’s The Story I Tell Myself. In the context of first-person narration, she shows how the philosophers in question turn their attention inward and unleash their analytical rigor on themselves.

Wright argues that philosophical autobiography makes philosophical analysis necessary and that one cannot unfold without the other. Her distinction between the ontological and rhetorical dimensions of the self creates a rich middle ground in which questions of essence and identity bear upon existence.

“There is much to admire in this book. The idea of using philosophical autobiography as a means of investigating the nature of self and self-examination is a fruitful one. Wright identifies an interesting and important set of issues, and picks a wonderful group of texts through which to address them. In addition to the five philosophical autobiographies that form the core of her investigation, she also makes reference to an astonishingly wide array of philosophers and literary theorists, providing an enormously multifaceted investigation into the philosophy of self.” — Biography

“Prof. Wright[’s] intellect possesses all the vigor and fervor of youth, and her subject is timely and interesting.” — Metapsychology Online Reviews

“Wright’s book is a thorough, sophisticated, and illuminating exploration. She draws on substantial contemporary philosophical and literary sources in developing her own distinctive and creative dialectical interpretation centered in the polarities of ontological/rhetorical, inner/outer self, and author-subject/writer-self.” — James Woelfel, University of Kansas

J. Lenore Wright is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction

1. Writing the Self

Groundwork for a Study of Autobiography
Writing the Examined Life
The Rationale for Autobiographical Writing
Autobiography As Confession: Knowledge and Coherence
Features of Autobiographical Writing
The Function of Autobiographies

2. Bifurcating the Self

Self-Ascription and Self-Description
The Inner Self
The Outer Self
Conclusions

3. Masking the Self

Deception and Concealment
Knowledge and Truth in Autobiography
Self-Deception
Self-Concealment
Self-Masking
Conclusions

4. Transforming the Self

The Dialectic of Philosophical Autobiography
Interpretation and Understanding
Gracia on Interpretation
Gadamer on Truth in Interpretation
Nietzsche and the Subversion of the Self
Writing the Author
Writing Gender

Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Related Subjects

Literary Criticism
Philosophy
Autobiography, Biography & Memoir

45401/45402(NE/MH/AV)