Increasing use is made of techniques which are supposed to make policy decisions more ‘rational’. Rather little attention, however, has been paid to the relation between these techniques and the logic of choice, the political process, value judgements and assumptions. This short paper will investigate these questions in relation to a particularly fashionable technique, that of cost-benefit analysis.

Each of us is not just a set of actions, experiences, and plans but also a set of traits, capacities, and attitudes; we are as much our character as our life. And while story form can help unify a messy life, when it comes to a messy character, we may need something like the form of a poem. Could we model our self-conception, then, on a work like Sonnet 35? In finding deep-going unity—and even bittersweet beauty—beneath surface-level ambivalence, Sonnet (...) 35 arguably offers a perfect formal model, pointing the way to a transfiguration, through art, of intractable internal conflict. (shrink)

The self-fashioning of French Newtonianism Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9511-3 Authors Charles T. Wolfe, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia David Gilad, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This paper examines self-fashioning in Aleksandar Hemon’s “Everything,” a story about a Sarajevo teenager’s journey through ex-Yugoslavia to the Slovenian town of Murska Sobota. His aim? “[T]o buy a freezer chest for my family” (39). While in transit, the first-person narrator imagines himself a rogue of sorts; the fictional journey he takes, meanwhile, is clearly within the quest tradition. The paper argues that “Everything” is an unruly text because by the end of the story the reader must jettison (...) the conventional reading traditions the quest narrative evokes. What begins as a comic tale about a minor journey opens out, in the story’s final lines, into a story about larger historical concerns, namely, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. By introducing contemporary history, Hemon points beyond the closed world of his short story, while rejecting the quest pattern he has established. (shrink)

The idea of self-fashioning that Stephen Greenblatt presents in his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning can be very useful in an effort to understand Christine de Pizan's work. Specifically, a reading of The Treasure of the City of Ladies or The Book of the Three Virtues in the light of self-fashioning may help explain the book's intent. In writing The Treasure, Christine is often criticized for what appears to be a departure from her vigorous defense of (...) women presented in The City of Ladies. The article argues, however, that quite the contrary is the case in the later book. Christine uses self-fashioning in The Treasure as a strategy of survival for herself and other women. For example, she frames an argument in which she casts the male literary establishment as well as the misogynistic texts produced by that establishment as Other. Consequently, what appears to be submission in The Treasure is really a textual strategy, a subversion which is aimed at giving women an identity and protecting them against the many dangers of a male-dominated world. (shrink)

In this paper I interpret Montaigne’s essay, “On Educating Children”, as a pedagogical text through its performance of a distinct epistolary function, one that addresses the letter-recipient for the purpose of shaping the ideas, actions, and beliefs of that individual. At the same time, I also read “On Educating Children” within the context of the wider project of Montaigne’s Essays, which, as I suggest, is an ethical-aesthetic project of self-fashioning and self-cultivation. The net result is an interpretation (...) of teaching as an ethical-aesthetic practice of the self, one that is in concert with the interpretation of Montaigne’s writing of the Essays as a similar practice of the self. In order to build this case, I employ Michel Foucault’s fourfold schema of ethical subjectivity, mapping that schema onto “On Educating Children”, so as to reveal a unique pedagogy of self-formation—a pedagogy that works as much upon the self of the teacher as it does the self of the student. (shrink)

This book offers a compelling new interpretation of James' moral philosophy: an "ethics of responsible self-fashioning." James' performative writing style articulates this conception by showing how moral inquiry serves both social and personal transformation. James the social moral philosopher seeks to create an inclusive moral order through expansion of sympathetic concern among those committed to different ideals. James the existential moral philosopher defends the right to adopt hope-grounding metaphysical beliefs which encourage strenuous moral action in the face of (...) evil and suffering. The power of James' ethics is demonstrated by its application to current discussions about the status of marginalized nonhuman animals and that of the cognitively disabled. William James and the Moral Life is of interest to a wide variety of ethicists and has special appeal to scholars and advanced students in moral philosophy, social philosophy, pragmatism, and American philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines Foucault's reading of Plato and ancient philosophy as part of his continuing dialogue and debate with Derrida. It contends that this debate not only in part motivates Foucault's turn to antiquity, but also is directly revelatory of the most basic differences between Foucault's and Derrida's conceptions of philosophy.

Pliny’s letters generally seem designed to portray an image of Pliny himself as kind and altruistic, fulfilling the obligations of a Roman aristocrat. But in one group of his letters—those about the infamous delator Marcus Aquilius Regulus—the author’s voice instead appears malignant and hostile. If, as seems certain, Pliny carefully planned his letters with the aim of portraying himself in a certain way, why the discrepancy? This chapter argues that these letters serve a deliberate purpose in constructing part of the (...) overall persona Pliny wishes to project—a neo-Ciceronian persona of eloquence, moralizing, and memorializing. (shrink)

Review of Alexander Nehamas, "The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault".

This article investigates the interplay of agriculture and writing in the elder Cato's aristocratic self-fashioning . I argue that the De Agricultura represents Cato and his contemporaries as individual, small-plot farmers by making explicit the agricultural inflection of a more general masterly extensibility, i.e., that slaves were prosthetic tools with which owners accomplished various tasks, a move that in turn reveals the ubiquitous, assiduous “labor” of the individual owner. The preface's valorization of small-plot farmers, past and present, contextualizes (...) the owner's “labor” both culturally and historically , and thereby seeks to bridge the agricultural and temporal divide that separates Cato and his contemporaries from their esteemed predecessors. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between the discourse of death, or thanatology, and self-fashioning, in John Chrysostom’s thirteenth homily In epistulam ad Romanos. The study argues that thanatology became a very important feature in the care of the self in Chrysostom’s thought. The central aim here is to demonstrate the multi-directional flow of death, as a corporeal discourse, between the realms of theology, ethics, and physiology. Firstly, the article investigates the link between (...) the theological concepts of sin and death. Secondly, the study argues that death also becomes a highly paradoxical discourse when it enters the realm of Chrysostomic virtue-ethics, where the mortification of excessive passion leads to life, while ‘living’ in passion only results in death on every level of existence – death as a discourse therefore becomes interiorised, a process functioning as a subset of a more extensive biologisation of the spiritual life-cycle. Finally, Chrysostom also utilises death in a very physiological way, especially in his comments on the relationship between sin and the passions, and one’s physical health and appearance. (shrink)

This essay explores an aspect of Cicero's use of cultural writing for political ends: his employment of the epideictic rhetorical mode in two of his speeches, Pro Archia and In Pisonem. The epideictic is a ludic rhetorical domain that embraces paradoxes: it encompasses both praise and blame, is both markedly Greek and proximate to the Romans' laudatio funebris, and is associated both with textual fixity and viva voce improvisation. The epideictic mode is thus an ideal vehicle for Cicero's self- (...) class='Hi'>fashioning and, moreover, constitutes a framework which reveals that Cicero's encomiastic defense of Archias' Roman citizenship and his invective against his aristocratic nemesis Piso are polar and complementary opposites. The self-consciously literary quality of epideictic allows Cicero to transform the Pro Archia from a legal defense to a general meditation on literary culture in which Cicero blurs himself with his client to defend his own status within Rome's elite while fixing his version of his consulate in ornate prose. The Pro Archia simultaneously becomes a simulacrum of the poem which Cicero hopes Archias will write and Cicero's own pre-mortem funeral oration. Yet the Pro Archia's suppressed legal arguments pregure the eventual failure of his immediate self-fashioning aims. The In Pisonem's invective inverts the Pro Archia's self-fashioning strategies in order to debunk Piso's image and to recuperate Cicero's own prestige at the expense of Piso's. The In Pisonem has the same long-range cultural ambitions as the Pro Archia, but without the previous speech's hopes for tangible short-term success. Faced with his inability to cause Piso real political damage, Cicero crafts an ornately polished caricature of Piso designed to achieve canonical longevity. Cicero's reception by the orators of Seneca's Suasoriae and Controversiae gives evidence of the successes, and limitations, of these long-term cultural goals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New by Todd LekanHenry JackmanBy Todd LekanWilliam James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New York: Routledge, 2022. 156pp., incl. indexWhile William James wrote just a single article in theoretical ethics, it has often been said that ethical concerns animate almost all of his work.1 Indeed, there has been a growing interest in James’s moral philosophy, (...) and Todd Lekan’s William James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning is the latest, and arguably the best, sustained attempt to introduce readers to James’s ethical thought. The task is not an easy one, since the one essay of James’s that explicitly focuses on theoretical ethics, 1891’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, deals with ‘social’ concerns that don’t clearly align with the more ‘existential’ questions that run through the rest of his corpus.2 In particular, James’s main ‘ethical’ concerns in most of his writings seem to relate more to our living ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’ lives than it does to our living a ‘moral’ ones. Consequently, writings on James’s ethics tend to treat these two strands separately, either focusing disproportionately on just one of these two aspects, or treating the two as separate components that do not affect one another.3 Weaving both strands of James’s ethical though into a coherent whole may be the primary achievement of Lekan’s book, but he provides much insight into interpretive problems relating to the individual threads along the way.The more ‘social’ strand is admirably explained in Lekan’s first chapter, “Pragmatist Moral Philosophy and Moral Life: Embracing the Tensions”, where he outlines James’s meta-ethical views from “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, and gives an account of the regulative assumptions and regulative ideals that James appeals to in order to go from his initial thesis that all goodness originates from the desires of sentient beings to the conclusion that “we are morally obligated to [End Page 105] satisfy as many demands as possible”, and that among the available ideals we might choose, “we are morally obligated to adopt ideals whose realization does not undermine the ideals held by others” (15).Ideals move to center stage in the book’s second chapter, “Ideals and Significant Lives”, which trades the social ethics of the first chapter for more existential concerns, and explains how James takes the strenuous pursuit of our own ideals to amount to a kind of ‘self-fashioning’ that makes for a ‘meaningful’ life (36). This answer to the existential question is, however, ambivalent about the social one. Unlike some other interpreters who focus primarily on the existential question, Lekan notes that James’s pluralism about ideals seems to leave plenty of room for ideals that were very much out of line with the moral injunctions of James’s social ethics to produce perfectly significant lives.4 So, for instance, pursuing an ideal tied to the promotion of the supremacy of one’s religion at the expense of all others might satisfy the requirements for creating a significant life, even if that ideal required the relentless persecution of those who did not share it. Indeed, the ideals in question need not be as extreme as this; even more mundane ideals like becoming a great painter, while not directly requiring that you harm others, might still be successfully pursued in a way that ignored the demands of others that was in tension with “The Moral Philosopher”’s emphasis on maximizing overall demand satisfaction.5As the book’s subtitle suggests, Lekan attempts to harmonize the social and existential strands of James’s thought by arguing that our self-fashioning is “responsible” when the ideals involved satisfy the constraints of the moral philosopher discussed in chapter one (50). In particular, the subject who strenuously pursues such moral ideals is characterized as the “existential moral philosopher” (29–30) and striving to satisfy that ideal would produce a life that met both James’s social and existential concerns. That said, it would have been helpful to see a little more about the tension between these two sides... (shrink)

What does it mean to know who you are? Is it a matter of knowing your name? The things that you’ve done? The people you love? Such indispensible knowledge is somehow not enough; I can know all of these things, and still feel puzzled about who I am. “I am not the person I once was,” “I am not myself today,” and “I am learning who I am,” are all commonplace poems of a kind: expressive sentences completely at home both (...) in literature and ordinary life. Such a poem is the sentence “I know who I am.” This last is one of the many grand and emblematic boasts of Miguel de Cervantes’s hilariously self-fashioned knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, a boast that can seem both impossible and yet utterly sensible, part quixotic and... (shrink)

ArgumentNineteenth-century Prussia was deeply entrenched in philhellenism, which affected the ideological framework of its public institutions. At Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, philhellenism provided the rationale for a persistent elevation of the humanities over the burgeoning experimental life sciences. Despite this outspoken hierarchy, professor of physiology Emil du Bois-Reymond eventually managed to increase the prestige of his discipline considerably. We argue that du Bois-Reymond’s use of philhellenic repertoires in his expositions on physiology for the educated German public contributed to the rise (...) of physiology as a renowned scientific discipline. Du Bois-Reymond’s rhetorical strategies helped to disassociate experimental physiology from clinical medicine, legitimize experimental practices, and associate the emerging discipline with the more esteemed humanities and theoretical sciences. His appropriation of philhellenic rhetoric thus spurred the late nineteenth-century change in disciplinary hierarchies and helped to pave the way for the current hegemonic position of the life sciences. (shrink)

Many scholars have sought to understand renaissance culture in terms of self-fashioning, a concept that sees the sixteenth-century preoccupation with imitation and performance as symptoms of a desire to conform outwardly to social expectations. Historians of Tudor England and biographers of Thomas More, influenced by this concept, have despaired of discovering the “true” Thomas More behind a bewildering array of self-fashioned masks that More “wore” as both an author and public figure. Recent scholarship seeks to show the (...) coherence of More's character, despite the fact that his life and writings do not fit neatly into contemporary scholarly categories. Understanding More as a “Christian Humanist” and focusing on More's intervention in a controversy between his friends Erasmus and Dorp, this study positions More as engaging in typological emulation, whereby in imitating the correspondence of Jerome and Augustine, he seeks to embody more perfectly the ideal of the Christian orator. (shrink)

While The Second Sex is usually taken as Simone de Beauvoir's major theoretical contribution to feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s it was very often through her autobiographies – especially Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, and Force of Circumstance, along with novels such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins – that her feminist ideas were most thoroughly absorbed. The autobiographies became nothing less than a guide for the fashioning of a new kind of (...) feminine self. Where The Second Sex had intimated that a significant aspect of human liberation lay in women not losing their identity or their sense of self in those of men, it was the autobiographies which suggested and demonstrated in great detail how this might be done. In them, the rejection of conventional marriage and children was no mere slogan, but the foundation of what seemed to young female readers to be a fascinating and challenging life. In this paper, I reflect on de Beauvoir and her historical and contemporary relevance: first through reminiscence and re-reading of the autobiographies themselves; then with an historical examination of how they were read, taking Sydney, Australia, as my example; and finally by offering some reflections on subsequent feminist critique. (shrink)

Despite the shifting ideologies of gender of the seventeenth century, the arrival of the first actresses caused deep social anxiety: theatre gave women a voice to air grievances and to contest, through their own bodies, traditional gender roles. This paper studies two of the best-known actresses, Nell Gwyn and Anne Bracegirdle, and the different public personae they created to negotiate their presence in this all-male world. In spite of their differing strategies, both women gained fame and profit in the male-dominated (...) theatrical marketplace, confirming them as the ultimate “gender benders,” who appropriated the male role of family’s supporter and bread-winner. (shrink)

The Bellum Hispaniense, often considered alongside the two other pseudo-Caesarian commentarii, the Bellum Alexandrinum and the Bellum Africum, contains the account of Caesar's final battles with Pompey's forces in Spain during 46 and 45 b.c. In terms of its language and style, the BHisp. is certainly the most un-Caesarian of the pseudo-Caesarian Bella. The work abounds in phenomena belonging to different linguistic varieties, and is an important piece of evidence in the process of the standardization of written Latin.

Hinging on a metaphysical examination of the concept of newness and Paul Guyer’s notion of the temporally extended self, this article analyzes what it means that we are a temporally extended being that is fashioned in time, which is none other than a transcendental object = newness, and argues that (fashioned) bodies can be things in themselves and mere phenomena simultaneously. Kant’s doctrine of self-positing assists us in decoding how the subject obtains an embodied experience while a thing (...) in itself, as well as how both a non-empirical affection and an empirical affection are at play, casually affecting the subject. By looking into how double affection is in operation, this article aims to broaden our understanding of Kant’s theory of self-consciousness. (shrink)

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Australian microbiologist F. Macfarlane Burnet sought a biologically plausible explanation of antibody production. In this essay, we seek to recover the conceptual pathways that Burnet followed in his immunological theorizing. In so doing, we emphasize the influence of speculations on individuality, especially those of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead; the impact of cybernetics and information theory; and the contributions of clinical research into autoimmune disease that took place in Melbourne. We point to the influence of (...) local experimental and intellectual currents on Burnet’s work. Accordingly, this essay describes an arc distinct from most other tracings of Burnet’s conceptual development, which focus on his early bacteriophage research, his fascination with the work of Julian Huxley and other biologists in the 1920s, and his interest in North Atlantic experimental investigations in the life sciences. No doubt these too were potent influences, but they seem insufficient to explain, for example, Burnet’s sudden enthusiasm in the 1940s for immunological definitions of self and not-self. We want to demonstrate here how Burnet’s deep involvement in philosophical biology – along with attention to local clinical research – provided him with additional theoretic tools and conceptual equipment, with which to explain immune function. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a considerable resurgence in the popularity of tattooing and piercing, a development that some have dismissed as a fashionable trend. Others have argued that the relative permanence of such forms of body modification militates against their full absorption into the fashion system. Drawing on interviews with a variety of body modifiers, the article examines this debate, and notes that certain tattooees and piercees appear, in some respects, to regard their tattoos and piercings as decorative accessories. At (...) the same time, however, such corporeal artifacts are approached and experienced as distinct from other, more free-floating products in the `supermarket of style'. Whether or not their meaning is fixed in these terms, tattoos and piercings are employed by some as a form of anti-fashion and as a way of fixing or anchoring the reflexively constructed self. In this sense they share both affinities and differences with other forms of contemporary body project. (shrink)