Abstract

This is a collection of essays dealing with such topics as personal identity, fear of death, self-deception, akrasia, jealousy, the virtues and their vicissitudes, and practical reasoning. Despite the wide range of these topics, the author's method and style yield a strong sense of continuity. Each essay calls attention to the historical contexts in which human actions, virtues, and vices have been defined, and to the psychological complexities that have often been neglected in more exclusively epistemological studies of reason and emotion. The book is divided into four sections. "Persons and Personae" characterizes as a philosophical dream the project of deriving normative political and moral principles from a single foundational conception of personhood. Intractable debates about moral issues tend to arise whenever the practical contexts governing diverse definitions of personhood are blurred. We may learn more about such practical contexts, and therefore about the uses and abuses of the concept of a person, by tracing the literary representations of human agency in the characters, figures, selves, and individuals depicted in Biblical narratives, Greek dramas, medieval mystery plays and Chaucerian tales, romantic and social novels, and twentieth-century short stories, plays, and science fiction.