Patrick Stokes

Uses insights from Kierkegaard to explore contemporary problems of self, time, narrative and death Is each of us the main character in a story we tell about ourselves, or is this narrative understanding of selfhood misguided and possibly harmful? Are selves and persons the same thing? And what does the possibility of sudden death mean for our ability to understand the narrative of ourselves? These questions have been much discussed both in recent philosophy and by scholars grappling with the work of the enigmatic 19th-century thinker Søren Kierkegaard. For the first time, this collection brings together figures in both contemporary philosophy and Kierkegaard studies to explore pressing issues in the philosophy of personal identity and moral psychology. It serves both to advance important ongoing discussions of selfhood and to explore the light that, 200 years after his birth, Kierkegaard is still able to shed on contemporary problems.

This chapter analyses the views of Soren Kierkegaard about the concept of death. It examines the historical reasons why death might have featured with especial prominence in the work of a writer concerned with the parlous state of post-Hegelian Christianity and explains that Kierkegaard saw more of death before his thirtieth birthday than most people see in a lifetime. The chapter also explains the meaning of death in the mention of death in some of his works, including Either/Or, For Self-Examination, and The Sickness Unto Death.

The Naked Self explores Søren Kierkegaard's understanding of selfhood by situating his work in relation to central problems in contemporary philosophy of personal identity: the role of memory in selfhood, the relationship between the notional and actual subjects of memory and anticipation, the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience, affective alienation from our past and future, psychological continuity, practical and narrative approaches to identity, and the intelligibility of posthumous survival. By bringing his thought into dialogue with major living and recent philosophers of identity, Stokes reveals Kierkegaard as a philosopher with a significant--if challenging--contribution to make to philosophy of self and identity.

The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo‐Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four‐dimensionalist, temporal‐parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self‐reference and self‐experience, on the other, can't be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves—which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity‐constituting somewhat under‐motivated.

Paolo Diego Bubbio's Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition offers a valuable and insightful discussion of the place of sacrifice plays in nineteenth century European philosophy, setting the stage for its emergence as a central theme in subsequent continental thought. Bubbio offers a strong case for the claim that the foundational move of the post-Kantian tradition is a fundamentally kenotic one. Bubbio is also critical of certain excesses in the way sacrifice is discussed in more recent work. However, the case of Kierkegaard in particular suggests kenosis is not so easily kept within the comfortable boundaries Bubbio prescribes for it: its excesses may be an integral part, rather than a hyperbolic distortion, of the logic of sacrifice.

Social media is full of dead people. What should we do with all these digital souls? Can we delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Patrick Stokes claims that we have a moral duty towards the digital dead. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, but - with such developments as AI-driven chatbots simulating the dead - it also makes them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, and the moral status of digital remains.

Despite their many similarities, one apparent difference between the ethics of K.E. Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas concerns trust: Levinas does not analyse trust as a morally significant phenomenon, whereas Løgstrup makes it a central component of his moral phenomenology. This paper argues that an analysis of Løgstrupian trust nonetheless reveals at least three important commonalities between Levinas and Løgstrup’s moral projects: an understanding of war and ethics as metaphysical opposites; an emphasis on openness to the other as something that transcends the prudential order of norms and laws; and a view of the ethical as that which breaks into and disrupts the order of human instrumental calculation.

Søren Kierkegaard remains one of the most enigmatic, captivating, and elusive thinkers in the history of European thought. The Kierkegaardian Mindprovides a comprehensive survey of his work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising thirty-eight chapters by a team of international contributors, this handbook is divided into eight parts covering the following themes: Methodology Ethics Aesthetics Philosophy of Religion and Theology Philosophy of Mind Anthropology Epistemology Politics. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, Kierkegaard's work is central to the study of political philosophy, literature, existentialist thought, and theology. l to the study of political philosophy, literature, existentialist thought, and theology.

The heavily discussed (neo-)Lucretian symmetry argument holds that as we are indifferent to nonexistence before birth, we should also be indifferent to nonexistence after death. An important response to this argument insists that prenatal nonexistence differs from posthumous nonexistence because we could not have been born earlier and been the same ‘thick’ psychological self. As a consequence, we can’t properly ask whether it would be better for us to have had radically different lives either. Against this, it’s been claimed we can form preferences as to which ‘thick’ (psychological) self our ‘thin’ (metaphysical) self would be better off ‘associated’ with. I argue that these discussions draw the right distinction, but do so in the wrong place: understanding the ‘thin’ self phenomenally instead of metaphysically allows us to understand how we can rationally form preferences to have been somebody else.

This paper contrasts Kierkegaard's response to Epicurean indifference to death in "At a Graveside" with attempts in contemporary analytic philosophy to overcome Epicurus ' challenge to the rationality of fearing death. I argue that attempts by Nagel, Pitcher, Feinberg etc. to show why death is a harm rely on a narrative understanding of life that, according to Kierkegaard, is unavailable with respect to one's own death. Kierkegaard's approach, by contrast, involves becoming phenomenally co-present with one's own death via a specific mode of "earnest" contemplation.

The epistemological literature on conspiracy theory has established that strict generalism about conspiracy theories is untenable. This chapter argues, however, that this does not license a move to naive or strict particularism. Rather, any consideration of specific conspiracy claims needs to address conspiracy theory not simply as a formal category of explanation, but as a distinctive social practice, with a history and explanatory repertoire that can give us important, if defeasible, reasons for rejecting at least some such types of claim. These reasons are not merely epistemic. The moral costs of participating in such practices, and of levelling conspiracy accusations in general, generate corresponding ethical requirements for reticence about entertaining conspiracy theories. This doesn’t mean we can retreat to generalism; but it does mean particularism must be governed by a reluctance that, in practice, will rule out a great many conspiracy theory claims as candidates for serious investigation.

The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo‐Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four‐dimensionalist, temporal‐parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self‐reference and self‐experience, on the other, can't be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves—which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity‐constituting somewhat under‐motivated.

Stokes’ earlier chapter in this volume argued that, given the role ethical considerations play in our judgments of what to believe, ethical factors will put limits on the extent to which we can embrace particularism about conspiracy theories. However, that will only be the case if there are ethical problems with conspiracy theory as a practice (rather than simply as a formal class of explanation). Utilising the Lakatosian framework for analysing conspiracy theories developed by Steve Clarke, this paper identifies a morally costly feature of conspiracy theorizing: its tendency to generate and expand new accusations purely to defend the core theory from countervailing evidence. Such 'auxiliary accusations' violate important norms around justified accusation, which supplies a defeasible, but important, reason to be reluctant to take part in the practice of conspiracy theorizing.