Self and will

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 81-94

  Nathan, N M L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Metaphysics; Personal identity; Self; Voluntarism; Will

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949149556     PISSN: 09672559     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09672559708570846     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Lewis, D. 'Survival and Identity', Philosophical Papers, I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 56.
2. Parfit, D. Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
3. Foster, J. 'In Self-Defence', in G. MacDonald (ed.) Perceptions and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 175.
4. Foster, J. The Immaterial Self (London: Routledge, p. 250). The ancestral of a relation is that relation which stands to it in the way that being an ancestor of stands to being a parent of.
5. See Dainton, B.F. 'Time and Division', Ratio NS 5 (1992), pp. 102-28.
6. While Foster accepts an act-object account of experience, Dainton's C-relation is formulated in terms of something like the paradoxical view which Russell expressed when he said that 'the occurrence of the content of a thought constitutes the occurrence of the thought'. The Analysis of Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921), p. 2).
7. For other aspects of Dainton's C-relation see 'Survival and Experience', Proceedings of the Aristotolian Society, 96 (1995-6), pp. 17-36.
8. Swinburne, R.G. The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 154.
9. Cf. Foster (1985), pp. 254-263.
10. Sprigge, T.L.S. 'Personal and Impersonal Identity', Mind, 97 (1988).
11. T.L.S. Sprigge, Personal and Impersonal Identity, Ibid., p. 48.
12. In his excellent book On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) Carl Ginet remarks that the recent trend among philosophers to deny volition 'was a hangover from the excesses of philosophical behaviourism.
13. In the rejection of introspectionist psychology and the older philosophy of mind, volition was one of the babies thrown out with the bathwater (subjective sense experience in perception was another one)', p. 24 n. 3.
14. I agree, and have tried to support this verdict in Will and World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), ch. 8.
15. I mistakenly canvassed a purely active internalizing concept in Will and World.
16. The argument is unaffected if immediate retrospection is substituted for introspection. And indeed we must make that substitution if we want to say both that no two simultaneous mental items have the same ultimately specific volitional quality, and that both a mental item and the experiencing of that item have that quality. There are, anyway, independent grounds for the substitution. Rapt attention to a content leaves no attention over for the simultaneous introspection of the attention. Brentano was right to note the strangeness of 'subsequently coming to have a recollection of something which we had not noticed when it was present' Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint trans. London L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 126n. But there is a greater mystery in his own substitute for introspection, an act of inner perception whose secondary object is that whole act itself.
17. Berkeley, Philosophical Commentaries in A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop (eds) The Works of George Berkeley (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1948-57), 829.
18. Cf. Lloyd, A.C. 'The Self in Berkeley's Philosophy', in J. Foster and H. Robinson (eds) Essays on Berkeley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
19. . . . the thread or chain of such pitches of 'doing-be's, prior to nature's being overlaid, is self.' (Hopkins, G.M. in C. Devlin (ed.) Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 151.
20. Cf. Nathan, N.M.L. 'Hopkins's Selfless Self of Self, Literature and Theology, 7 (1993), pp. 397-402.