Making of the Good Person - Self-Help, Ethics and Philosophy

This book provides a philosophical assessment of the idea of personhood advanced in popular self-help literature. It also traces, within academic philosophy and philosophical scholarship, a self-help culture where the self is brought forth as an object of improvement and a key to meaning, progress and profundity.

List of contents

1. Introduction Part 1: Reading the Self-help Culture 2. What is Self-help? 3. Plural Histories of Self-help 4. Self-help and Governmentality 5. We Have Always Been Governed Part 2: Philosophy as a Self-transformative Practice 6. Transformative Hopes in Philosophy 7. Pierre Hadot – Philosophy as a Spiritual Practice 8. Foucault’s Two Faces? 9. Murdoch’s Platonic Ascent 10. Wittgenstein’s Therapy 11. Cavell’s Ethics of Becoming 12. Ways Forward

About the author

Nora Hämäläinen is Docent and University Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is the author of Descriptive Ethics: What Does Moral Philosophy Know about Morality? (2016) and Literature and Moral Theory (2015).

Summary

This book provides a philosophical assessment of the idea of personhood advanced in popular self-help literature. It also traces, within academic philosophy and philosophical scholarship, a self-help culture where the self is brought forth as an object of improvement and a key to meaning, progress and profundity.

Product details

• Authors: Nora (University of Helsinki Hamalainen, Nora Hämäläinen
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 07.10.2024
• EAN: 9781032390116
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3239011-6
• No. of pages: 252
• Series: Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; Sociology, PHILOSOPHY / General, PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Ethics & moral philosophy, Social, group or collective psychology, Literary studies: general, Ethics and moral philosophy, Western philosophy from c 1800, Western Philosophy, From C 1900 -