Becoming a Self (Purdue University Press Series in the History of Philosophy) - Softcover

Merold Westphal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557530904 ISBN 13: 9781557530905

Publisher: Purdue University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Soren Kierkegaard (1818-55) is perhaps best known for his existentialism, and his critique of the Western metaphysical tradition makes him a religiously committed postmodernist. Becoming a Self provides a reader's guide to the book often taken to be Kierkegaard's most important contribution to philosophy and theology. Merold Westphal includes the portion of Kierkegaard's text that develops his infamous thesis that truth is subjectivity, and offers a dose reading of the entire text of Postscript. In addition, he locates the text in the larger authorship of Kierkegaard, with special attention to the theory of stages or existence spheres; in the debate with Hegel, which is one of its most distinctive features; and in the conversations that make up contemporary postmodern philosophy. While postmodernism is usually thought to be inherently secular, Kierkegaard's pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, shows us what a variety of postmodern insights might look like if appropriated by religious thought. He tries to show that the demise of classical paradigms of selfhood do not require the abandonment of subjectivity and inwardness altogether, and that a decentered self can still be a responsible self. This volume continues Westphal's attempt to show that the individualism and "irrationalism" that have for so long been associated with Kierkegaard's thought are not the abandonment of community and thoughtfulness but powerful protests against major pathologies of complacent modernity. In this light, Kierkegaard's thought can be seen as a non-Marxist form of ideology critique.

About this title

About the Author:

Merold Westphal is the author of a number of books, including Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society; Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity; and God, Guilt, Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. He is also coeditor of Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity.

Review:

“This is an eminently successful piece of work and just the sort of thing we have come to expect from Merold Westphal. The text is a lucid, lively, humorous, readable, brisk, judicious commentary in American English from which students on many levels will profit.”

(John D. Caputo)

Plotting the Past stands out as a serious work marked by sharp analytical skills and an unusual breadth of subject matter encompassing questions of genre and ideology that are central to present-day critical discourses.

Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian
(Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian)

. . . Coletta has given us a book that is engaging, challenging, and astute. For its mature historical sense and theoretical refinement, Plotting the Past deserves high praise.

CLIO
(CLIO)

“Why Manzoni’s I promesi sposi and ‘Del romanzo storico’ – models, respectively, for the writing and the theroretical rejection of historical fiction – should continue to resonate in both the creation of and debates surrounding twentieth-century Italian fiction is a question amply and eloquently answered in Della Coletta’s Plotting the Past. A felicitous combination of broad contextual and detailed textual analyses, these readings of Manzoni, Lampedusa, Morante, and Eco animate issues of genre, gender, historiography, literary history, and epistemology, all the while focusing on the construction of what might called an ‘ethics of historical fiction.’ The relationship of that vexing couple – history and fiction – has rarely been so lucidly scrutinized, nor the reasons for its continuing union so convincingly and gracefully argued. This book is a major achievement.”

(Rebecca West, University of Chicago)

About this edition

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1557530904
• ISBN 13: 9781557530905
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276