The Philosophy of Autobiography

Brief Description: This book promises to be the first of its kind: a philosophical investigation of autobiographical writing. All of us are autobiographers at least some of the time, and all of us crave certain kinds of recognition and confirmation from others, just as we fear blame and reproach from those who know us well. The philosophy of autobiography examines this fundamental story-telling process and its place in our lives. As such it straddles a number of long-standing philosophical questions, having to do with the meaning of life, the problems of autonomy and responsibility and authenticity, the nature of self-deception and bad faith, the structure of the self and its existence through time, the question of the reliability and meaning of memory, and the problem of understanding another person and imaginatively identifying with him. The contributors to the volume are mostly philosophers, but many of them have interests outside philosophy and have been informed by research findings from literary theory and from psychiatry. Some of the contributors are also literary theorists, and one of them has even published autobiographical work. Contributors also examine specific autobiographies and diaries, of philosophers and non-philosophers, as well as fictional works using an autobiographical format, in order to explore the philosophical implications and presuppositions of the genre. The result is a most useful and productive interdisciplinary exchange."Biographical Note: Christopher Cowley is a lecturer in philosophy at University College Dublin and the author of "Medical Ethics: Ordinary Concepts, Ordinary Lives.""Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Review Quotes: A fascinating and important volume, full of the excitement of a newly emerging field and remarkable for the richness and diversity of its case studies. The authors, from different disciplines, offer penetrating analyses of particular autobiographies, biographies, films, and novels, revealing often surprising similarities and differences between these forms, and also reflect on deep philosophical issues about narrative, personal identity, fictional characters, self-deception, knowledge, and agency, as well as the complex motives people have for writing about themselves. --Peter Lamarque, author of The Opacity of Narrative"Review Quotes: "The Philosophy of Autobiography" stands a very good chance of opening up and popularizing a new area of interdisciplinary research. It has found a fresh site for reflection on the relevance of literature and narrative to selfhood, reinvigorating the so-called narrative conception of selfhood, whose study seems otherwise to have run out of steam. Autobiography, as this volume demonstrates, exposes new regions for thinking about how we can articulate a sense of self: of being a person burdened with a life that has a certain shape and structure. --John Gibson, author of Fiction and the Weave of Life"Table of Contents: Introduction: What Is a Philosophy of Autobiography? 1 Art Imitating Life Imitating Art: Literary Narrative and Autobiographical Narrative Marya Schechtman 2 A Person s Words: Literary Characters and Autobiographical Understanding Garry L. Hagberg 3 Body, Memory, and Irrelevancies in "Hiroshima mon amour" Christopher Hamilton 4 Memory, Self-Understanding, and Agency Marina Oshana 5 Telling Our Own Stories: Narrative Selves and Oppressive Circumstance John Christman 6 Self-Deception, Self-Knowledge, and Autobiography Somogy Varga 7 Autobiographical Acts D. K. Levy 8 Writing about Others: An Autobiographical Perspective Merete Mazzarella 9 From I to We: Acts of Agency in Simone de Beauvoir s Philosophical Autobiography J. Lenore Wright 10 Fraudulence, Obscurity, and Exposure: The Autobiographical Anxieties of Stanley Cavell Aine Mahon List of Contributors Index"Publisher Marketing: We are living through a boom in autobiographical writing. Every half-famous celebrity, every politician, every sports hero even the non-famous, nowadays, pour out pages and pages, Facebook post after Facebook post, about themselves. Literary theorists have noticed, as the genres of creative nonfiction and life writing have found their purchase in the academy. And of course psychologists have long been interested in self-disclosure. But where have the philosophers been? With this volume, Christopher Cowley brings them into the conversation. Cowley and his contributors show that while philosophers have seemed uninterested in autobiography, they have actually long been preoccupied with many of its conceptual elements, issues such as the nature of the self, the problems of interpretation and understanding, the paradoxes of self-deception, and the meaning and narrative structure of human life. But rarely have philosophers brought these together into an overarching question about what it means to tell one s life story or understand another s. Tackling these questions, the contributors explore the relationship between autobiography and literature; between story-telling, knowledge, and agency; and between the past and the present, along the way engaging such issues as autobiographical ethics and the duty of writing. The result bridges long-standing debates and illuminates fascinating new philosophical and literary issues. "

Contributor Bio:  Cowley, Christopher Christopher Cowley is Lecturer in Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of Moral Responsibility (2013) and the editor of The Philosophy of Autobiography (2015).