Being Yourself: Essays on Identity, Action, and Social Life (Feminist Constructions) - Softcover

Meyers, Diana Tietjens

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0742514781 ISBN 13: 9780742514782

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004

Synopsis

Being yourself: living a life that is truly your own, that expresses your unique personality and your distinctive values. Many people want to live such a life. Being Yourself asks what it takes to do so. It examines questions about the self ― the individual who acts ― together with questions about self-expression ― the relations between the self and action. It explains self-knowledge and self-direction in terms of a repertory of skills that gives people insight into who they are, who they want to be, and how they want to engage with the world. Unlike other accounts of self and action, Being Yourself takes into account the multidimensionality of the self ― embodiment, interpersonal ties, nonconscious desires, and enculturation as well as rationality. It accents the ways in which atypical emotional responses, empathy, and oppositional imagery can contribute to moral understanding. It argues that repressive regimes cannot completely crush people's determination to live lives of their own, but it shows why it is vital to seek social changes that dismantle obstacles to this kind of life.

About this title

About the Author:

Diana Tietjens Meyers is professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Review:

Diana Tietjens Meyers is one of the most subtle and complex philosophers of feminist autonomy and agency writing today. In this book, she has presented a powerful analysis of the forms of autonomy in contemporary social life, and the impasses, ruses, and limitations that can impede autonomous agency. An original contribution to one of the most vexing and contested concepts in feminist philosophy. (Elizabeth Grosz, Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor, Duke University)

Meyers's style is elegant, insightful, and altogether gripping in places. Peppered with personal experiences and analogies, this book is likely to be pleasing to any interested reader. (Metapsychology Online)

Diana Meyers's Being Yourself is an important and original theory of autonomy that manages, by virtue of both its philosophical rigor and its keen eye for the realm of practice, to show how moral agents can exercise their authentic selves in a world where socialization and political barriers prevail. Meyers's discussion of autonomy and female genital cutting contains the strongest argument I know for viewing autonomy within culture rather than against it. (Marion Smiley, J. P. Morgan Chase Chair in Ethics, Brandeis University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0742514781
• ISBN 13: 9780742514782
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344