Patrick Stokes

Locke, Kierkegaard and the Phenomenology of Personal Identity

Abstract Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke’s original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard’s account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson).

Deletion as second death: the moral status of digital remains

There has been increasing attention in sociology and internet studies to the topic of ‘digital remains’: the artefacts users of social network services (SNS) and other online services leave behind when they die. But these artefacts also pose philosophical questions regarding what impact, if any, these artefacts have on the ontological and ethical status of the dead. One increasingly pertinent question concerns whether these artefacts should be preserved, and whether deletion counts as a harm to the deceased user and therefore provides pro tanto reasons against deletion. In this paper, I build on previous work invoking a distinction between persons and selves to argue that SNS offer a particularly significant material instantiation of persons. The experiential transparency of the SNS medium allows for genuine co-presence of SNS users, and also assists in allowing persons (but not selves) to persist as ethical patients in our lifeworld after biological death. Using Blustein’s “rescue from insignificance” argument for duties of remembrance, I argue that this persistence function supplies a nontrivial (if defeasible) obligation not to delete these artefacts. Drawing on Luciano Floridi’s account of “constitutive” information, I further argue that the “digital remains” metaphor is surprisingly apt: these artefacts in fact enjoy a claim to moral regard akin to that of corpses.

Naked Subjectivity: Minimal vs. Narrative Selves in Kierkegaard

Abstract In recent years a significant debate has arisen as to whether Kierkegaard offers a version of the “narrative approach” to issues of personal identity and self-constitution. In this paper I do not directly take sides in this debate, but consider instead the applicability of a recent development in the broader literature on narrative identity—the distinction between the temporally-extended “narrative self” and the non-extended “minimal self—to Kierkegaards work. I argue that such a distinction is both necessary for making sense of Kierkegaards claim that we are ethically enjoined to become selves, and can indeed be found in Either/Or and the later The Sickness Unto Death . Despite Kierkegaards Non-Substantialism, each of these texts speaks (somewhat obliquely) of a “naked self” that is separable from the concrete facticity of human being. In both cases, this minimal self is linked to issues of eschatological responsibility; yet the two works develop very different understandings of “eternity” and correspondingly divergent accounts of the temporality of selfhood. This complicates the picture of Kierkegaardian selfhood in interesting ways, taking it beyond both narrativist and more standard neo-Lockean models of what it is to be a self.

Kierkegaard's Mirrors : The Immediacy of Moral Vision

This paper explores Kierkegaards recurrent use of mirrors as a metaphor for various aspects of moral imagination and vision. While a writer centrally concerned with issues of self‐examination, selfhood and passionate subjectivity might well be expected to be attracted to such metaphors, there are deeper reasons why Kierkegaard is drawn to this analogy. The specifically visual aspects of the mirror metaphor reveal certain crucial features of Kierkegaards model of moral cognition. In particular, the felicity of the metaphors of the “mirror of possibility” in Sickness Unto Death and the “mirror of the Word” in For Self‐Examination depend upon a normative phenomenology of moral vision, one in which the success of moral agency depends upon an immediate, non‐reflective self‐referentiality built into vision itself. To “see oneself in the mirror” rather than simply seeing the mirror itself is to see the moral content of the world as immediately “about” oneself in a sense that goes beyond the conceptual content of what is perceived. These metaphors gesture towards a model of perfected moral agency where vision becomes co‐extensive with volition. I conclude by suggesting directions in which explication of this model may contribute to discussions in contemporary moral psychology.

‘See For Your Self’: Contemporaneity, Autopsy and Presence in Kierkegaard's Moral-Religious Psychology

The achievement of ‘Contemporaneity’ with the putatively historical event of the incarnation is a key element in Kierkegaard’s description of religious belief, a concept that found later expression in the work of Gadamer and Bonhoeffer. Yet it has been objected that Kierkegaard provides no account of how such atemporal ‘contemporaneity’ with historical events is actually possible. In his strident rejection of the then-dominant Hegelian processive understanding of history, Kierkegaard seems to endorse an impossible model of direct, historically unconditioned engagement with the past. This paper explores Kierkegaard’s descriptions of contemporaneity on the experiential level to discern the structures of cognition and imagination necessary for the achievement of contemporaneity, as well as its evasion through imaginative distance. What emerges is not a historically unconditioned way of thinking about the past, but a highly specific, self-referential mode of cognition which allows the contemplator to become meaningfully co-present with temporally distant events.

Narrative, Identity and the Kierkegaardian Self

Freedom and Narrative Identity: Hegel and Kierkegaard on the Self Woburn Room 7b. Jeffrey Hanson (Australian Catholic University) Marrying the Ideal and Actual: Kierkegaard’s Religious Aesthetic and the Self

Anti-Climacus and Neo-Lockeanism

This paper attempts to situate Anti-Climacus ontology of selfhood in the context of contemporary personal identity theory. In important respects, Anti-Climacus can be read as belonging to a tradition, originating with Locke, that sees psychological continuity as conferring selfhood or personhood. However, the curious temporal characteristics of spirit presented in The Sickness Unto Death point to crucial differences between the Anti-Climacan approach to the question of self-constitution and that taken by mainstream neo-Lockean personal identity theorists.

Are there dead persons

Abstract Schechtman’s ‘Person Life View’ (PLV) offers an account of personal identity whereby persons are the unified loci of our practical and ethical judgment. PLV also recognises infants and permanent vegetative state patients as being persons. I argue that the way PLV handles these cases yields an unexpected result: the dead also remain persons, contrary to the widely-accepted ‘Termination Thesis.’ Even more surprisingly, this actually counts in PLV’s favor: in light of our social and ethical practices which treat the dead as moral patients, PLV gives a more plausible account of the status of the dead than its rival theories.

Kierkegaard’s dual individual: reconciling selfhood in the existentialist and analytic traditions

Kierkegaard and later existentialists were centrally concerned with the irreducibility of the first person perspective. Kierkegaard sought to defend this perspective from the objectivizing tendencies of Idealism, while philosophy today, with its near-universal commitment to some form of naturalism, likewise struggles to accommodate, or simply dismisses, subjective properties. We find ourselves caught between an understanding of persons as a type of object, and existentialist analyses of the self as a subject structurally incapable of coinciding with itself. We thus need, to use a phrase from Sellars, a form of “stereoscopic” vision-for which Kierkegaard’s account of selfhood provides important resources.

The Untameable Logic of Sacrifice

Abstract Paolo Diego Bubbios Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition offers a valuable and insightful discussion of the place of sacrifice plays in nineteenth century European philosophy, setting the stage for its emergence as a central theme in subsequent continental thought. Bubbio offers a strong case for the claim that the foundational move of the post-Kantian tradition is a fundamentally kenotic one. Bubbio is also critical of certain excesses in the way sacrifice is discussed in more recent work. However, the case of Kierkegaard in particular suggests kenosis is not so easily kept within the comfortable boundaries Bubbio prescribes for it: its excesses may be an integral part, rather than a hyperbolic distortion, of the logic of sacrifice.