„MI NEMAMO BUDUĆNOST“: DRŽANJE NASTAVE FILOZOFIJE NARATOSKEPTIČKIM UČENICIMA

The paper will deal with a challenge presented to the standard conceptions of philosophy as the art of living. Since the conceptions of a fulfilled/happy/authentic life rest on the conception of a temporally continuous self, Galen Strawson narratosceptic position and a view of the Episodic self require us to rethink the standard methods of teaching philosophy. We will assess Strawson’s position and attempt to provide a possible answer.

Reconciling Locke’s Consciousness-Based Theory of Personal Identity and His Soteriology

This article maintains that Locke’s consciousness-based theory of personal identity, which Locke expounded in book 2, chapter 27 of the second edition of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), perfectly fits with his views on the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, and salvation. The compatibility of Locke’s theory of personal identity with his soteriology has been questioned by Udo Thiel and Galen Strawson. These two authors have claimed that Locke’s emphasis on repentance, which he described as necessary to salvation in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), clashes with his notion of punishment as annexed to personality and, hence, to consciousness. Pace Thiel and Strawson, I argue that Locke’s theory of personal identity is compatible with his concept of repentance. To this purpose, I first explain Locke’s views on the soul’s death and the resurrection of the dead on Judgment Day, when, according to Locke, we will all be raised from death by divine miracle, but only the repentant faithful will be admitted to eternal bliss while the wicked will be annihilated. Locke’s mortalism, along with his agnosticism on the ontological constitution of thinking substances or souls, played a role in his formulation of a non-substantialist account of personal identity, because it denied the temporal continuity of the soul between physical death and resurrection and it rejected the resurrection of the same body. I then analyze Locke’s consciousness-based theory of personal identity, with a focus on the implications of this theory regarding moral accountability. Finally, I turn my attention to Thiel’s and Strawson’s considerations about Locke’s views on consciousness and repentance. To prove that Locke’s views on salvation are consistent with his theory of personal identity, I clarify Locke’s soteriology, which describes not only repentance, but also obedience, faith, and the conscientious study of Scripture as necessary to salvation.

Preaching to episodic ears: Practicing a dramaturgical homiletic

This article is a critical attempt to develop a homiletic methodology for preaching to the episodic self of the 21st century. The British philosopher Galen Strawson contends that postmodern people today do not regard themselves as living out their lives in a diachronic or narrative sense, but rather in an episodic-existential sense. This episodic-existential way of perceiving one’s life has recently posed a significant challenge to the current preaching practice that is mostly composed and delivered from the pulpit through a narrative. This article provides a considerate response to that episodic-existential challenge. Specifically, the article proposes a dramaturgical narrative form of preaching, in close collaboration with Paul Tillich’s existential theology, as a creative alternative to the conventional narrative way(s) of preaching.

Locke on Knowledge and Reality

This book is essentially a commentary on John Locke’s masterwork, his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which is the foundational work of classical Empiricism. It aims to be accessible to students who are reading Locke for the first time, to be a useful research tool for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, and to make a contribution to Locke scholarship. It is designed to be read alongside the Essay, but does not presuppose familiarity with it. It expounds and critically discusses the main theses and arguments of each of the Essay’s four books, on the innatism that Locke opposes, the origin and classification of ideas, language and meaning, and knowledge, respectively. It analyzes Locke’s influential explorations of related topics, including primary and secondary qualities, substance, identity, personal identity, free will, nominal and real essence, and external-world skepticism, among others. It is written in an analytical style that strives for clarity and that offers step-by-step reconstructions of Locke’s arguments. It references and engages with relevant work of other major philosophers and Locke commentators, including, among others, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Thomas Reid, John Yolton, James Gibson, R. M. Chisholm, Michael Ayers, John Perry, John Mackie, Roger Woolhouse, Saul Kripke, Jonathan Bennett, E. J. Lowe, Vere Chappell, Samuel Rickless, Galen Strawson, Gideon Yaffe, and Matthew Stuart.

Nietzsche’s Theory of Agency

Nietzsche’s repudiation of free will and moral responsibility is documented throughout his corpus, and his arguments for this conclusion—arguments from his distinctive kind of fatalism, his skepticism about the causal efficacy of the will, and his particular brand of epiphenomenalism about the conscious mental states crucial to deliberation—are shown to undermine both compatibilist and incompatibilist views about free will and moral responsibility by engaging the views of many contemporary philosophers working on these topics, including Harry Frankfurt, Galen Strawson, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, Gary Watson, and others. In particular, the chapter argues that both “alternate possibilities” and “control” views of free will are vulnerable to Nietzsche’s critique. Some empirical evidence is adduced in support of Nietzsche’s view.

Opaque Selves: A Ricœurian Response to Galen Strawson’s Anti- Narrative Arguments

As narrative conceptions of selfhood have gained more acceptance within various disciplines including philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, so too have these conceptions been critically appraised. Chief among those who are suspicious of the overall viability of ‘narrative identity’ is the philosopher, Galen Strawson. In this paper, I develop five arguments underlying Strawson’s critique of narrative identity, and respond to each argument from the perspective of the hermeneutic phenomenology of Paul Ricœur. Though intuitive, I demonstrate that none of Strawson’s arguments are cogent. The confrontation between these two figures highlights a deep conceptual disagreement about our epistemic access to the self, which has thus far gone unrecognized in the Anglo-American discussion, so that it raises a new problem for the metaphysics of personal identity.

The Problem of Self-Creation

The new values, acquisition of which constitutes my act of self-creation, must be either continuous or discontinuous with the ones I already have. If they are continuous, I am not changing but rather working out the implications of the person I already was. If they are discontinuous and the new values contradict or come at a tangent to my old values, the change is not a product of my agency. I change, but I do not change myself. This paradox, adapted from the work of Galen Strawson, can be solved if we allow that the direction of value-dependence may be teleological: the aspirant’s values depend on, and are entailed by, those of the person she is trying to be. The aspirant does not fashion, control, or make the self she creates. Instead, she looks up to that self, tries to understand her, endeavors to find a way to her.