Lysaker speaks

Today's Lyceum Lecturer, John Lysaker ("Coming to Terms With the Self", James Union Building 304, 4 pm)-

Emory Prof coming to terms with self

Applied Philosophy Lyceum: John Lysaker

COMING TO TERMS WITH SELFHOOD

On Friday April 20 Professor John Lysaker will give a lecture entitled, "Coming to Terms with Selfhood."

Professor Lysaker is currently Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. From 1996 to 2009 he taught Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. Raised in NJ, he attended Kenyon College and did his graduate work at Vanderbilt University. His work concerns the nature of the self, with a particular eye on the conditions under which humans do and do not flourish. This has led him to consider the importance of poetry for life, the nature of mental illness, schizophrenia in particular, the importance of friendship for human growth and happiness, and the ways in which various institutions (e.g. government, markets, professions) enable or undermine human well-being.

He is the author of Emerson and Self Culture (Indiana University Press), You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense (Pennsylvania University Press), and co-author (with his brother Paul) of Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self (Oxford University Press). He has also co-edited Emerson and Thoreau: Figures of Freindship (Indiana University Press).

The purpose of the Applied PhilosophyLyceum is to provoke philosophical reflection by bringing distinguished scholars to the MTSU campus to address crucial contemporary issues.

The lecture will be held April 20, 2012 at 4:00 in James Union Building, Room 304 on the Middle Tennessee State University Campus. The lecture is free and open to the public. A discussion period and an informal reception will follow.

For more information, contact the MTSU Philosophy Department at 898-2907.

Who are you?

Julian Baggini on the chimerical self. We're all literally no-thing. That's the Buddhist and Humean view, and neuroscience backs them up. Brains give rise to the sense of self, but there's much more (and less) to a person than a brain. This doesn't mean you're not real or that nothing is real. Nothing is, but impermanence is not unreality.




Maybe Lawrence Krauss can help disentangle the verbal morass we tend to fall into when we try to make sense of ourselves as relational beings. Or maybe it just takes a mystic.

Damasio

Antonio Damasio (Descartes' Error, Looking for Spinoza) has a new book, Self Comes to Mind. He talked about in on SciFri the other day.

I like what he says about creativity and consciousness:

Without consciousness--that is, a mind endowed with subjectivity--you would have no way of knowing that you exist, let alone know who you are and what you think. Had subjectivity not begun, even if very modestly at first, in living creatures far simpler than we are, memory and reasoning are not likely to have expanded in the prodigious way they did, and the evolutionary road for language and the elaborate human version of consciousness we now possess would not have been paved. Creativity would not have flourished. There would have been no song, no painting, no literature. Love would never have been love, just sex. Friendship would have been mere cooperative convenience...

I think he's been reading some James. And maybe Lanier. He said some gracious and charitable things on the radio about philosophers, and about how he doesn't think neuroscientists can figure it all out by themselves.

Good. Many minds are better than one.

John Updike, U & me

Another fallen hero...

I once published a brief comment about John Updike's aversion to materialist metaphysics. He had written, in his reluctant memoir Self-consciousness:

"When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept—the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation."

I wrote:

Updike may appear to yearn for the supernatural, but in fact his books are full of appreciation for the natural, simple satisfactions of everyday life. He would love nothing more, it seems, than to "be a self forever."

That's still how I read him. I wish he could be a self forever, here amongst the selves we're sure of, for my own selfish reasons as one of his most admiring readers; and because he was the theist whose charm and intelligence and humanity most tempered my inclination to dismiss theism as nothing but the residue of pre-scientific superstition.

It is very sad to think of his no longer being here. What a vast space of "emotion and conscience, memory and intention and sensation" for us all to try and fill. Who will temper me now?

Addendum: Garrison Keillor has penned a very nice tribute to Mr. Updike, eliciting from me a brief further comment...

Very nice tribute to a very great man whose greatness was out of all proportion to his humilty and generosity of spirit. I've posted my own humble tribute to him at http://delightsprings.blogspot.com/ and though I never met him, I think (based on something he told Terri Gross about his distress in contemplating the intrusions of biographers, even friendly ones) he would say that as an admiring reader I did, sort of, know the best of him.