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Samuel Clark explores how we can learn about ourselves by reading, thinking through, and arguing about autobiography. He defends a self-realization account of the self and the good life, and argues that self-narration plays less role in our lives than some thinkers have supposed, and the development and expression of potential much more.
List of contents
- 1. Introduction
- Part I
- 2. Routemap 1: Autobiography
- 3. Autobiography is Recollection
- 4. Autobiography is Reflection on Experience
- 5. Autobiography is Artefactual
- 6. Autobiography is a Genre
- 7. Autobiography is Narrative
- 8. Paradigm Autobiographical Form
- 9. Autobiography is a Local Tradition
- 10. Rationalism about Autobiography
- 11. Autobiography as Clue and as Container
- 12. Autobiography as Historical Data
- 13. Autobiography as Thought Experiment
- 14. Form enables Reasoning
- 15. Particular Reasoning
- 16. Diachronic Reasoning
- 17. Compositional Reasoning
- 18. Objection: Autobiographies are Novels
- 19. Self-reflective reasoning
- 20. Horizontal Connection not Vertical Generalization
- 21. Routemap 2: Uses of Autobiography
- 22. Two Purposes of Autobiography
- 23. The Delphic Demand
- 24. Explanation
- 25. Justification and Self-enjoyment
- 26. Selfhood
- 27. Good life
- 28. Reductionism about Meaning
- 29. Accounts of the Self
- 30. Taxonomies of the Self
- 31. Tasks for an Account of the Self
- 32. Accounts of the Good Life
- 33. Taxonomies of the Good Life
- 34. Tasks for an Account of the Good Life
- 35. The Self and its Good
- 36. Self-realization
- 37. Ethical Objections to Self-realization
- 38. Metaphysics of the Realizable Self
- 39. An Epistemological Objection to Self-realization
- 40. Experiential Objections to Self-realization
- 41. Routemap 3: from Part I to Part II
- Part II
- 42. Narrativist Views
- 43. Routemap 4: The Dialectic between Narrative and Self-realization
- 44. Siegfried Sassoon s Memoirs
- 45. The Shape of a Life
- 46. Narrative Non-additivity
- 47. Non-narrative Explanations of Non-additivity
- 48. Neither Agents nor Temporal Sequences Explain Non-additivity
- 49. Telling does not Explain Non-additivity
- 50. Genre does not Explain Non-additivity
- 51. Self-realization Explains Non-additivity
- 52. Narrative Self-unification
- 53. Irony vs Rosati
- 54. Transformative Experience vs Schechtman
- 55. Against Narrative Self-unification
- 56. For Self-realization over a Life
- 57. Objection: The Self is a Self-interpretation
- 58. First Reply: Self vs Persona
- 59. Second Reply: Pluralist realism about Self-knowledge
- 60. Introspection is a Bad Method of Self-discovery
- 61. The Objective Stance is an Incomplete Method of Self-discovery
- 62. Pleasure as Self-discovery
- 63. John Stuart Mill s Autobiography
- 64. Edmund Gosse s Father and Son
- 65. Lessons from Mill and Gosse
- 66. Asceticism
- 67. Enlistment as Self-discovery
- 68. Solitude as Self-discovery
- 69. Asceticism as Self-discovery
- 70. Pluralist Realism about Self-knowledge
- 71. Self-knowledge and Self-realization
- 72. Autobiography and Self-knowledge
- 73. Routemap 5: Against Narrative, for Self-realization
- 74. Objection: What about You?
- Works Cited
- Index
About the author
Samuel Clark is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University.
Summary
Samuel Clark explores how we can learn about ourselves by reading, thinking through, and arguing about autobiography. He defends a self-realization account of the self and the good life, and argues that self-narration plays less role in our lives than some thinkers have supposed, and the development and expression of potential much more.
