Topic
38 readings
Self, mind and experience
Topic · 38 readings
What is a self, and what does experience disclose?
A place to begin
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 64
Describe experience before explaining it away
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe experience through three ideas: intentionality, bracketing and embodiment. How does a whole object appear through changing bodily perspectives?
Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 82
What would explain conscious experience?
Does Mary learn something new when she first sees color? Jackson argues that she learns what the experience is like; Lewis’s ability hypothesis questions whether that is a new fact, and Chalmers separates explaining functions from explaining experience.
All readings
38 readings · Title A–Z
Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 69
A self seen through a racial order
Du Bois describes double consciousness, and Fanon the meanings a racial order imposes on a body. The lesson distinguishes their accounts and what each makes of the possibility of recognition.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 5 of 12
Anxiety and a life that can end
Heidegger distinguishes anxiety from fear and treats death as a possibility that bears on how a life is lived. The lesson compares the readings of Blattner and Hoffman, questions the priority given to anxiety and asks for no personal disclosure.
Guided course · Module 10 · Lesson 57
Can freedom have a history?
Hegel argues that freedom needs recognition and shared institutions, and that history advances toward freedom. The lesson examines those arguments and confronts the exclusions in his account of history.
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 64
Describe experience before explaining it away
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe experience through three ideas: intentionality, bracketing and embodiment. How does a whole object appear through changing bodily perspectives?
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 65
Freedom in a situation one did not choose
Beauvoir’s account of situated freedom leads to questions about oppression and support. How can one person open another’s possibilities without directing their life?
Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 51
Habit, causation and the self
Hume traces our expectations beyond observed cases to custom, and questions whether we ever perceive an unchanging self. His account of the self leaves a difficulty he kept open.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 4 of 12
How a situation matters to us
For Heidegger, attunement is a way of finding oneself in a situation, and care unites being ahead of oneself, being already in a world and being involved with beings. The lesson separates what a mood discloses from what it proves, and care from kindness.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 3 of 9
How can a passing moment belong to a whole?
Husserl distinguishes retention of what has just passed from protention of what is coming, and both from recollection, which is another event. The lesson assesses what his description can establish about the unity of temporal experience.
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 7 of 9
How can a possibility matter without being true?
For Whitehead, a proposition can engage us whether or not it is true. The lesson compares affirmation, denial and suspended judgment without making usefulness the test of truth.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 4 of 9
How can another person be given to me?
Husserl explains how another person is given through the lived body, pairing and appresentation. The lesson follows his account without treating another person’s experience as something one possesses or copies.
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 4 of 9
How can something new arise from what is given?
Whitehead distinguishes the conditions an occasion inherits, the pure possibilities it can draw on and the experience it achieves. Why does he invoke God’s valuation of possibilities, and what does the occasion’s self-determination leave unexplained?
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 3 of 9
How does the past enter a new experience?
Whitehead describes how a new occasion takes in its past through prehension. The lesson separates the source of an inheritance from its contribution to a new feeling, and tests his account of selective causal reception.
Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 48
How far can doubt take us?
Descartes moves from deliberate doubt to the certainty that he is thinking, a starting point the lesson keeps apart from his further claims about mind and body.
Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 39
How inherited ideas become new arguments
Toegye and Yulgok debate how the Four Beginnings relate to the Seven Feelings, and what makes a feeling morally good. Itō Jinsai’s criticism of inherited vocabulary shows another way of transforming Confucian learning.
Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 50
Ideas, experience and a material world
Locke traces ideas to experience and distinguishes primary from secondary qualities; Berkeley challenges the material substance supposed to bear them. What does experience warrant about the objects we encounter?
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 4 of 8
Is the self its parts, or their owner?
Is the self the changing body and mind, or something other than them? Nāgārjuna rejects both, models the person on fire and its fuel, and still refuses to conclude that there is no self.
Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 22
Justice in a person and a city
Plato compares a just city with a well-ordered soul. Inner harmony might guide conduct, but order alone does not establish fair treatment of others.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 6 of 9
Learning a way of moving
Learning a skill, or adapting to a changed tool, can alter what a body is able to do. Following Merleau-Ponty on the body schema and habit, the lesson asks whether his account gives fluency too much authority.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 7 of 12
Living from a past toward a future
Heidegger finds the unity of care in temporality and moves from inherited possibilities to a people’s destiny. What does that move leave ethically unjustified?
Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 10
Mind, discipline and freedom
Sāṃkhya and Yoga both distinguish consciousness from the changing mind. If liberation does not consist in improving that witnessing consciousness, what can mental discipline change?
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 1 of 9
One thing, more than one appearance
Husserl distinguishes an object from its changing appearances, and an act of experience from its intentional correlate. Intentionality, the lesson shows, needs neither an inner picture nor an infallible report, and leaves room for error and correction.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 3 of 12
Other people and the way one does things
Even work done alone can be shaped by being-with and by the everyday authority Heidegger calls the they. The lesson separates shared norms from conformity and asks how help can support or displace another person’s agency.
Knowing oneself in Poimandres · Lesson 1 of 1
Poimandres: knowing oneself and trusting a teacher
The teaching in Poimandres links self-recognition to salvation. The lesson keeps the authority of this teaching story apart from historical interpretation and from independent support for the claims it makes.
Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 37
Self and ultimate reality: two Vedānta accounts
Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja read the same scriptural words about self and brahman in different ways, and give different accounts of unity, difference and the knowledge that liberates.
Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 72
Self, world and nothingness in modern Japan
Nishida’s accounts of pure experience, place and absolute nothingness change over time. The lesson compares them with the earlier Buddhist idea of emptiness and examines the political implications proposed for his metaphysics.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 8 of 9
Sharing a world without sharing one perspective
Merleau-Ponty describes meeting others in a shared bodily and cultural world, and the lesson compares his account with Husserl’s. Sharing an object or an exchange, it shows, is not the same as sharing access, agreement or justified belief.
Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 7
Suffering, impermanence and not-self
Early Buddhist discourses challenge the hope of finding a secure self in changing experience, and do so for the sake of liberation. Not-self, the lesson shows, is not the claim that nothing exists.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 5 of 9
The body through which a world appears
Merleau-Ponty criticizes the picture of a mechanical body supplemented by an inner observer, and describes the lived body as access to a world. The lesson keeps the value of physical description and asks what reflection from within a situation can establish.
Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 28
Time, will and the inward turn
Augustine examines a divided will and asks where the time we measure could be. Habit, memory, attention and expectation shape his answers; how far can an inward inquiry explain what it finds?
Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 27
Unity, intellect and the life of the soul
Plotinus argues from the multiplicity of things to the One, a first principle beyond Intellect. The lesson asks how Intellect, Soul and the soul’s return fit together, and why an experience of unity does not by itself prove the explanation.
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 2 of 9
What becomes actual?
Whitehead begins with occasions of becoming rather than enduring things, and treats even nonconscious actuality as experiential. What does he gain by doing so, and what does he still owe?
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 9 of 9
What can last in a world that perishes?
Whitehead holds that the past goes on having effects and proposes that God preserves what the world achieves. The lesson tests what either claim establishes about personal survival and suffering, and ends the study with a cumulative checkpoint.
Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 6
What could it mean to know the self?
Maitreyī asks what wealth can promise, and the answer she hears turns to knowing the knower. What does this Upanishadic account of the self explain, and what does it leave hard to understand?
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 6 of 9
What do we encounter when we perceive?
Whitehead separates presentational immediacy, a thing’s clear appearance, from causal efficacy, its felt influence, and joins them through symbolic reference. How does that joining make perception useful, and how can it mislead?
Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 34
What does experience tell us about the world?
Vasubandhu uses dreams to ask what appearances establish, and store consciousness to explain continuity without a permanent owner. Rival interpretations of representation and external objects stay open.
Guided course · Module 10 · Lesson 55
What must experience already involve?
Kant asks what conditions any objective experience must meet. The lesson separates those conditions from knowledge of particular causes and from things considered in themselves.
Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 82
What would explain conscious experience?
Does Mary learn something new when she first sees color? Jackson argues that she learns what the experience is like; Lewis’s ability hypothesis questions whether that is a new fact, and Chalmers separates explaining functions from explaining experience.
Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 74
Who is speaking when a philosophy is called communal?
Gyekye and Wiredu offer their own argued interpretations of Akan personhood. Hountondji criticizes the assumption that a whole people speaks with one voice, and Oruka investigates individual reasoning in oral dialogue.
Study this in sequence
Knowing oneself in Poimandres
How could knowing oneself transform a life, and what warrants trusting a teacher who promises salvation? Follow the teaching encounter in Poimandres and examine how the work connects knowledge with divine life.
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world
An experience receives a world it did not make, yet becomes something that was not there before. How can both be true? Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality builds a philosophy around that difficulty, asking us to begin with occasions of becoming and to explain enduring things, perception, judgment and value through their relations.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits
Begin with familiar encounters and follow Heidegger’s questions about being, a finite life, truth, art, dwelling and technology. Examine what the arguments explain, what they leave open and how they fare under political and ethical criticism.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world
Follow Husserl and Merleau-Ponty from the appearance of a familiar thing to time, bodily skill, expression and other people. Test what their descriptions establish, where their methods differ and what still needs evidence or an ethical argument.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths
Follow Nāgārjuna’s arguments that nothing has an intrinsic nature of its own, from causes and motion to persons, the two truths and the charge that the argument undermines itself. Ask what the arguments leave standing: can things exist, change and matter without such a nature?