Our Practices, Our Selves, Or, What It Means to Be Human

Our Practices, Our Selves, Or, What It Means to Be Human
by Todd May

# Paperback: 206 pages
# Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press; 1 edition (April 2001)

"This enjoyable book, written in an engaging, colloquial voice, is that rare kind of introduction to philosophy that both (1) shows that philosophy is a distinctive form of lively conceptual activity rather than an inert body of dusty doctrines and (2) makes a contribution to the field it introduces by showing the importance of our multifarious human practices to questions of selfhood and identity.

The fundamental thesis of the book--that practices are constitutive of the self in a deep way that has not been sufficiently recognized--is explored through wide-ranging examples, including global-technological capitalism, religious authority and the creationism debate, multiculturalism, psychoanalytical explanation, jazz, baseball, political activism, cooking, and many others. These diverse strands, although they obviously come from far and wide, are convincingly woven into a coherent and illuminating large-scale pattern.

This book shows the student, the general reader, or anyone interested in what philosophy--itself a practice--is how hard, clear thinking promotes human understanding and how helpful analytical thought can be to numerous hotly debated issues. Readers are given the conceptual tools and philosophical equipment they need as the book progresses, and they will know that they are in the hands of an excellent, confidence-inspiring teacher of the subject." —Garry L. Hagberg, Bard College

where did you buy this apple?

Rewriting the Self - History, Memory and Narrative

[Cy Twombly's "Venus"]

Rewriting the Self - History, Memory and Narrative

THE CREATIVE PROCESS OF NARRATING THE SELF
Professor Freeman's teaching and research interests include history and philosophy of psychology, the psychology of the self, and the psychology of art and creativity. His first book, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (Routledge, 1993), inquires into the process by which people reconstruct the meaning and significance of past experience. In order to answer the question, who am I?, a person turns to the past and, from the vantage point of the present, seeks to make sense of the movement of her/his life. The self created in the process of narrating is thus to be regarded not as some substantial "thing" but rather as a series of continuous tellings and re-tellings, issuing from the work of the narrative imagination. A second book, Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic Creativity (Cambridge, 1993), explores the lives of a group of aspiring American artists, focusing especially on problems of creativity as they relate to such issues as the mystique of the modern artist, the fashioning of artistic identity, and the limits and possibilities of modern art itself.





http://www.snapdrive.net/files/494742/kutu1/Rewriting%20the%20Self%20-%20History%2C%20Memory%20and%20Narrative%20%281996%29.pdf