The core of the text surveys the literature on the function of the self as a basis for evaluating social and personal experience and considers the role of the self as a causal influence in social behavior. Throughout, the authors emphasize the innovative methods by which the self is studied.
SELFHOOD is a practical self-help book, designed to help people to recover their sense of self, be happier and more fulfilled. Readers will learn a great deal about themselves, others and life. Readers will discover what selfhood means, how closely selfhood is linked to emotional and mental wellbeing and mental illness, the components of selfhood, how selfhood is lost, the feature of low and high selfhood, and how to reclaim one's sense of selfhood.SELFHOOD contains many practical suggests and recommended actions, devised to enhance people's sense of self. It is simply not possible to feel good, to regularly experience emotional wellbeing and mental health if your level of selfhood is low. SELFHOOD is the first of Dr. Terry Lynch's Mental Wellness Book Series.
Sculpting the Self addresses “what it means to be human” in a secular, post-Enlightenment world by exploring notions of self and subjectivity in Islamic and non-Islamic philosophical and mystical thought. Alongside detailed analyses of three major Islamic thinkers (Mullā Ṣadrā, Shāh Walī Allāh, and Muhammad Iqbal), this study also situates their writings on selfhood within the wider constellation of related discussions in late modern and contemporary thought, engaging the seminal theoretical insights on the self by William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. This allows the book to develop its inquiry within a spectrum theory of selfhood, incorporating bio-physiological, socio-cultural, and ethico-spiritual modes of discourse and meaning-construction. Weaving together insights from several disciplines such as religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, critical theory, and neuroscience, and arguing against views that narrowly restrict the self to a set of cognitive functions and abilities, this study proposes a multidimensional account of the self that offers new options for addressing central issues in the contemporary world, including spirituality, human flourishing, and meaning in life. This is the first book-length treatment of selfhood in Islamic thought that draws on a wealth of primary source texts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Greek, and other languages. Muhammad U. Faruque’s interdisciplinary approach makes a significant contribution to the growing field of cross-cultural dialogue, as it opens up the way for engaging premodern and modern Islamic sources from a contemporary perspective by going beyond the exegesis of historical materials. He initiates a critical conversation between new insights into human nature as developed in neuroscience and modern philosophical literature and millennia-old Islamic perspectives on the self, consciousness, and human flourishing as developed in Islamic philosophical, mystical, and literary traditions.
This book compiles poems of the author's beginning part of life where she was lost and gave up on trying. She also held up on little hope to survive. The author talks about the struggles of understanding living, and it reflects how she copes with it. One who reads may be able to relate with the thoughts and feelings.
According to James R. Mensch, a minimal requirement for ethics is that of guarding against genocide. In deciding which races are to live and which to die, genocide takes up a standpoint outside of humanity. To guard against this, Mensch argues that we must attain the critical distance required for ethical judgment without assuming a superhuman position. His description of how to attain this distance constitutes a genuinely new reading of the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, one that involves reassessing what it means to be a self. Selfhood, according to Mensch, involves both embodiment and the self-separation brought about by our encounter with others—the very others who provide us with the experiential context needed for moral judgment. Buttressing his position with documented accounts of those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, Mensch shows how the self-separation that occurs in empathy opens the space within which moral judgment can occur and obligation can find its expression. He includes a reading of the major moral philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Arendt, Levinas—even as he develops a phenomenological account of the necessity of reading literature to understand the full extent of ethical responsibility. Mensch's work offers an original and provocative approach to a topic of fundamental importance.
Contemporary understanding of human subjectivity has come a long way since the Cartesian 'thinking thing' or Freud's view of the self struggling with its unconscious. We no longer think of ourselves as stable and indivisible units or combinations thereof - instead, we see the self as constantly reinvented and reorganised in interaction with others and with its social and cultural environments. But the world in which we live today is one of uncertainty where nothing can be taken for granted. Coping with change is a challenge but it also presents new opportunities. Uncertainty can be both liberating and oppressive. How does an individual understand her or his position in the world? Are we as human beings determined by our genetic heritage, social circumstances and cultural preferences, or are we free in our choices? How does selfhood emerge? Does it follow the same pattern of development in all people, all cultures, all ages? Or is it a socio-cultural construction that cannot be understood outside its historical context? Are the patterns of selfhood fundamentally changing in the present world? Does new technology allow us more autonomy or does it tempt us to give up the freedoms we have? These are the questions that Zygmunt Bauman and Rein Raud explore in their engaging and wide-ranging dialogue, combining their competences in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory to look at how selfhood is produced in social practice, through language, efforts of self-presentation and self-realisation as well as interaction with others. An indispensable text for understanding the complexities of selfhood in our contemporary liquid-modern world.
Relating Narratives is a major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero. First published in Italian to widespread acclaim, Relating Narratives is a fascinating and challenging new account of the relationship between selfhood and narration. Drawing a diverse array of thinkers from both the philosophical and the literary tradition, from Sophocles and Homer to Hannah Arendt, Karen Blixen, Walter Benjamin and Borges, Adriana Cadarero's theory of the `narratable self' shows how narrative models in philosophy and literature can open new ways of thinking about formation of human identities. By showing how each human being has a unique story that can be told about them, Adriana Cavarero inaugurates an important shift in thinking about subjectivity and identity which relies not upon categorical or discursive norms, but rather seeks to account for `who' each one of us uniquely is.