Other Philosophy Commons^™

Neither Ātman Nor Anattā: Tapering Our Conception Of Selfhood, Roman Briggs

Comparative Philosophy

I provide critical discussion of conception of and talk of psychic integration which I take to be both excessive and deficient; these viciously extreme positions are championed by the Apostle Paul and St. Augustine (and both their religious and their secular cultural descendants in the West), and by Jacques Lacan and María Lugones (and their contemporaries), respectively. I suggest that we must negotiate a Buddhist-inspired understanding located between these extremes in endorsing any acceptable conception of the self, generally speaking—a conception which, contra the strong antirealist about selves, allows for the continued use of selfhood in everyday discourse, but which, …