CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons Notes CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 2. The Spectator, May 19 (1984), pp. 24-5. 3. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 49 ff. 4. Various scholars stress this general emphasis. Besides Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 51 ff., et passim, see R. S. Downie and Elizabeth Telfer, Respect for Persons (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 18 ff.; Jonathan Glover, I. The Philosophy of Personal Identity (London: Allen Lane, 1988): this study develops Parfit's arguments in a direction situating the person historically; Marcel Mauss, 'A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self', trans. W. D. Halls, The Category of the Person. Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1 ff.; Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1964. First published, 1958); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially Part I, 'Contingency', pp. 3-69. Interrelations between philosophy of mind in the Lockean tradition and an evaluative, broadly hermeneutical stance are intricate, but beyond the scope of this study. For alternative approaches, see for instance Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self. Philosophical Papers 1956-72 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1973). 5. Personal Knowledge, pp. 104, 174, 303, et passim. 6. See especially Paul Ricceur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 161 ff. 7. Jonathan Glover, I. The Philosophy of Personal Identity, pp. 139 ff. 8. Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM Press, 1980), p. 166. 9. George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989). p. 86. 10. See Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of Euro­ pean Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), pp. 1 ff. For a cautionary reaction to Snell, see Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 158 ff. 11. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 3 vols. The tension between the present and the allure of the 'not yet' is the leitmotif of Bloch's thinking. 223 224 Notes to pp. 6-10 12. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965). Page numbers to this edition are cited in the text. 13. See Dolores J. Palomo, 'The Dutch Connection: The University of Leiden and Swift's Academy of Lagado', Huntingdon Library Quarterly 41 (1977-78), 27-35. 14. See David Renaker, 'Swift's Laputans as a Caricature of the Car­ tesians', Publications of the Modern Language Association, 94 (1979), 936-44; Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Nora M. Mohler, 'The Scientific Background to Swift's Voyage to Laputa', and 'Swift's "Flying Island" in The Voyage to Laputa', Annals of Science II (1937), 299-34 and 405-30. 15. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 113. 16. For an account of this attachment, the 'balance of power' and lack of autonomy, see Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958), pp. 161 ff. 17. Dennis Todd, 'Laputa, the Whore of Babylon, and the Idols of Science', Studies in Philology 75 (1978), 114. 18. These points are developed by Todd, 'Laputa, the Whore of Babylon, and the Idols of Science', pp. 116 ff. 19. J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, J. M. Synge. Collected Works, vol. IV, Plays, Book II (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 51 ff. References to this edition are cited in the text. 20. John Butler Yeats, Essays Irish and American (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. First published, 1919), p. 58. Of the supposed murder, Yeats claims 'No one really believes it', and Christy's 'talk about the murder is a sudden freak of self-advertisement', part of the trials of 'a young poet in the supreme difficulty of getting born'. 21. C. C. Innes, 'Naked Truth, Fine Clothes and Fine Phrases in Synge's Playboy of the Western World', ed. Joseph Ronsley, Myth and Reality in Irish Literature (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1977), pp. 67 ff., stresses the 'anti-poetic' character of Old Mahon. 22. See for instance 'Possible Remedies', ed. Alan Price, ]. M. Synge: Collected Works, Vol. II, Prose (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 339-43. 23. The contrast between fantasy and realism is dealt with frequently, but see especially Edward Hirsch, 'The Callous Story and the Dirty Deed: the Two Playboys', Modern Drama 26, no. 1 (1983), 85-102. 24. See James Kilroy, The 'Playboy' Riots (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971). 25. The Irish Times, Thursday, 31 January, 1907, p. 5, claims that The Playboy 'is not a play with "a purpose" in the modern sense of the word, but although parts of it are, or are meant to be, an extravagant comedy, still a great deal that is in it, and a great deal more that is behind it, is perfectly serious, when looked at in a certain light.' Cited in Kilroy, The 'Playboy' Riots, p. 41. 26. Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (New York: Notes to pp. 11-19 225 Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 130. 27. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Peter Owen, 1960). 28. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), and especially the famous Chapter XI, 'The Structural Study of Myth', pp. 206-31. 29. Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text. A Post-Structuralist Reader (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 'Post-Structuralism: An Introduction', p. 8. 30. As Paul Ricreur points out. See for instance 'Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics', in Paul Ricceur. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 165 ff. CHAPTER 2: FUNDAMENTALS 1. It is worth noting that 'hermeneia' (and the verb form 'herrneneuo') are used in the New Testament. See for instance 1 Cor.2:10; 14:26, John 1:42, Hebrews 7:2. 2. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1977), p. 95: 'At present there is no general hermeneutics as the art of understanding but only a variety of specialised hermeneutics.' Further page numbers to this edition are cited in the text. 3. See W. Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), especially 'The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Studies', pp. 170-245. 4. See Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. from the 2nd rev. and augmented edition by Bernard Wall and Margot M. Adamson (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937), pp. 51 ff. 5. See Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931); Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960); Husser!: Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1989). 6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962, first published, 1927), p. 62. Further page numbers are cited in the text. 7. See Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1964; first published, 1958); The Tacit Dimension (New York: Anchor, 1966). 8. 'On Body and Mind', The New Scholasticism 4 (1969), 199. See also The Tacit Dimension, p. 4. 226 Notes to pp. 20-27 9. Personal Knowledge, p. 4. 10. For Polanyi on art, see especially Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 11. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 'The Origin of the Work of Art', pp. 74 and 23. 12. Edited by A. C. Cawley, The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958). 13. On coming awake and sleeping, and on the incarnation as a perpetual present, see Lawrence T. Ross, 'Symbol and Structure in the Secunda Pastorum', ed. Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson, Mediaeval English Drama. Essays Critical and Contextual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 207, 209. For a commentary on mythical, historical and present time, and the importance of charity, see Edgar Schell, 'Seeing Through a Glass Darkly. The Action Imitated by the Secunda Pastorum', Modern Language Quarterly 37 (1976), 3-4. 14. See Michael F. Vaughan, 'The Three Advents in the Secunda Pastorum', Speculum 55, 3 (1980), 484-505, for an account of this combination of eschatology with Biblical past and English present. 15. Josie B. Campbell, 'Farce as Function in the Wakefield Shepherds' Plays', Chaucer Review 14 (1980), 336-43. Yet Campbell also claims that the farce is itself displaced and accommodated to 'a better order' (338). 16. See Lois Roney, 'Wakefield First and Second Shepherds' Plays as Complements in Psychology and Parody', Speculum 58 (1983), 696-723. Roney argues against the generally received idea that the second play is a revision and replacement of the first, weaker one. Rather, both plays are about the damage done to human nature by the Fall. The first play offers an intellectualist solution, and the second a voluntarist one.
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