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The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity

Online ISBN:
9780191797033
Print ISBN:
9780198732730
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity

Patrick Stokes
Patrick Stokes
Deakin University
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Published online:
22 October 2015
Published in print:
1 September 2015
Online ISBN:
9780191797033
Print ISBN:
9780198732730
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Across his relatively short and eccentric authorial career, Søren Kierkegaard develops a unique, and provocative, account of what it is to be and become a self, backed up by a rich phenomenology of self-experience. Yet Kierkegaard has been almost totally absent from the burgeoning analytic philosophical literature that has sought to grapple with the topics of self-constitution and personal identity. How, then, does Kierkegaard’s work appear when viewed in light of current debates about self and identity—and what does Kierkegaard have to teach philosophers grappling with this topic today? This book explores Kierkegaard’s understanding of selfhood by situating his work in relation to central problems in contemporary philosophy of personal identity: the role of memory in selfhood, the relationship between the notional and actual subjects of memory and anticipation, the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience, the experience of being alienated from our past and future, psychological continuity across time, practical and narrative approaches to personhood, and the intelligibility of posthumous survival. By bringing his thought into dialogue with major living philosophers of identity such as Derek Parfit, Galen Strawson, J. David Velleman, Marya Schechtman, Mark Johnston, and others, Kierkegaard emerges as a philosopher with a significant—if challenging—contribution to make to philosophy of self and identity.

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