Anthony Rudd

This paper examines Kierkegaard 's discussion of patience in some of his Upbuilding Discourses, and its connection with his understanding of the nature of selfhood as it appears both in the Discourses and in The Sickness unto Death. That understanding stresses that selfhood is not simply given, but is a task to be achieved—although a task that can only be achieved by the self that is formed in the process of undertaking it. For Kierkegaard, an account of the self that recognizes its essential temporality must give a crucial role to patience as a virtue necessary for the formation and maintenance of personal identity. However, although the self is essentially temporal for Kierkegaard, it is also essentially such as to participate in eternity, and this complexity and tension in his concept of the self gives his understanding of patience a particular character—one that presents an important challenge to some of the dominant assumptions of recent and contemporary philosophy in both the analytic and the continental traditions

This book is a discussion of some of Kierkegaard's central ideas, showing their relevance to contemporary debates in epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Anthony Rudd's aim is not simply to expound Kierkegaard's ideas but to draw on them creatively in order to illuminate questions about the foundations of morality and the nature of personal identity, as discussed by analytical philosophers such as MacIntyre, Parfit, Williams, and Foot. Rudd seeks a way forward from the sterile conflict between the view that morality and religion are based on objective reasoning and the view that they are merely expressions of subjective emotions. He argues that morality and religion must be understood in terms of the individual's search for a sense of meaning in his or her own life, but emphasizes that this does not imply that values are arbitrary or merely subjective.

Stanley Cavell has suggested that the deepest roots of skepticism lie in a sense of alienation between the subject and the world, and this has led him to reassess the philosophical importance of the Romantic project of “re-enchanting” the world. One way to pursue this project is by starting from Kant’s reflections on the sublime. I consider Julian Young’s recent discussion of this topic and the Heideggeran pantheism to which it leads him. I conclude that, while there is much insight in Young’s reflections, there are crucial weaknesses in his position that point towards the plausibility of re-configuring it in more theistic and / or Platonic terms.

Many philosophers now argue that the doubts of the philosophical sceptic are unnatural ones, in that they are not forced on us by considerations that any reasonable person would have to accept as compelling but only arise if one has already accepted certain controversial theoretical commitments. In this article I defend the naturalness of philosophical scepticism against such criticisms. After defining "global ontological scepticism," I examine the work of a number of anti-sceptical philosophers—Michael Huemer, Michael Williams, and John McDowell. Although McDowell does move the debate to a deeper level by interpreting scepticism as a challenge to the very possibility of the mind's apprehending reality by being in a rational rather than a merely causal relation to it, none of them succeeds in showing that global ontological scepticism is, in the relevant sense, unnatural. This is not to say that the sceptic is correct; simply that it has not been shown that we can reasonably dismiss the sceptical questions and thereby evade the need to engage seriously with the sceptical arguments.

This paper defends and develops an argument against epiphenomenalism, broadly construed. I argue first for a definition of epiphenomenalism which includes ‘non-reductive’ materialism as well as classical dualistic epiphenomenalism. I then present an argument that if epiphenomenalism were true it would be impossible to know about or even refer to our conscious states -- and therefore impossible even to formulate epiphenomenalism. David Chalmers has defended epiphenomenalism against such arguments; I consider this defence and attempt to show that it fails. I conclude that an adequate account of mental causation requires us to abandon the principle of the causal closure of the physical, and attempt to rebut charges that it would be ‘unscientific’ to do so

This paper starts from the debate between proponents of a neo-Lockean psychological continuity view of personal identity, and defenders of the idea that we are simple mental substances. Each party has valid criticisms of the other; the impasse in the debate is traced to the Lockean assumption that substance is only externally related to its attributes. This suggests the possibility that we could develop a better account of mental substance if we thought of it as having an internal relation to its states. I suggest that we may be able to do this by relying on the notion of expression. In developing this idea I draw heavily on aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophical psychology, while also developing and criticizing Strawson's account of persons and recent work by Lynne Baker. I conclude by arguing that mental substance, understood in this way, can only be grasped in narrative terms; substantialist and narrative accounts of personal identity, far from being opposed, are mutually supporting and require one another to be coherent