Download philosophy and autobiography

FORUM FOR EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY IN OXFORD
OXFORD CENTRE FOR LIFE-WRITING
PHILOSOPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
WOLFSON COLLEGE, OXFORD
MONDAY 9 MAY 2016
10:30 am: COFFEE
11:00 am: Stephen Mulhall (Oxford): Philosophy and Autobiography
12:00 noon: Nicholas Bunnin (Oxford): Some Puzzles about Autobiography
1:00 pm: BUFFET SANDWICH LUNCH
1:45 pm: David Ellis (Kent): Autobiography and Truth
2:45 pm: Katerina Deligiorgi (Sussex): Life as Narrative
3:45 pm: TEA
4:00 pm: Sam Clark (Lancaster): Autobiography and the Shape of a Life
5:30 pm: END OF CONFERENCE
45 minute presentations followed by discussion
FURTHER DETAILS www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/oclw
REGISTRATION www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk
Theoretical and practical philosophical approaches to the ‘self’, the ‘subject’ or the ‘I’
have commonly provided poor guidance for comprehending autobiographies. Enticing
doctrines of the self and their accompanying notions of rigour, drawn from different
traditions of metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of
language, philosophy of science, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of religion and
aesthetics, have encouraged partial, distorted, restrictive, inflated or inappropriately
homogeneous ideals of the value of autobiographies and what autobiographies can
achieve.
Against this background, the conference takes experimental soundings of the
advantages of thinking about autobiography and philosophy together, asking whether
questions arising from writing and reading autobiographies can help to illustrate and
enrich philosophy as a humanistic discipline and whether philosophical reflection can
help to make orderly sense of the diverse accounts of what we seek and gain from
autobiographies. The purposes of the conference are sub-disciplinary as much as
interdisciplinary: presentations are as likely to subvert disciplines, disciplinary
boundaries and methodological ideals as to specify what can be gained from observing
them.
The conference speakers agree on the importance of autobiography as a topic for
philosophical investigation, but follow different trajectories in establishing their own
fresh ways of thinking about the topic. Influences include Aristotle, Augustine, Hume,
Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Lévinas, Beauvoir, Berlin,
Williams, Cioffi and Cavell and encounters with specific autobiographical types and
individual autobiographies. The conference will succeed to the degree that it
contributes to opening a public space for reasoning about philosophy and
autobiography and to populating that space with shared and linked questions that are
worthy of pursuit.
Jeremy Treglown, the distinguished biographer and former editor of the Times
Literary Supplement, will chair the conference.
In Philosophy and Autobiography, Stephen Mulhall develops themes drawn
from writings such as his article ‘Autobiography and Biography’ in The Oxford
Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (OUP, 2009) and his philosophical and
aesthetic investigations of subjectivity in The Self and its Shadows: A Book of Essays
on Individuality as Negation in Philosophy and the Arts (OUP, 2013).
In Some Puzzles about Autobiography, Nicholas Bunnin ponders our
fascination with autobiographies; varieties of autobiographical selves; peculiarities of
autobiographical knowledge; autobiographical language and forms; and how knowing
oneself and knowing others are related. His talk derives from his work on selfdeception, accounts of the other, the self in Chinese philosophy and biographical
knowledge.
David Ellis uses Autobiography and Truth to gather his reflections on Stendhal’s
autobiographical writings. His works include Dying Game 1922-1930: The Cambridge
Biography of D. H. Lawrence: Volume 3 (CUP, 1998); Literary Lives: Biography and
the Search for Understanding(Edinburgh UP, 2000); Memoirs of a Leavisite (Liverpool
UP, 2013); and Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt-Sleeves (Bloomsbury, 2015).
In Life as Narrative, Katerina Deligiorgi places autobiographical narratives within
the context of contrasting perspectives drawn from her ongoing work on philosophy
of action, theories of autonomy and philosophy of literature. She is the author of Kant
and the Culture of Enlightenment (SUNY Press, 2005) and The Scope of Autonomy:
Kant and the Morality of Freedom (OUP, 2012).
Sam Clark continues his work on autobiographies and ethics in Autobiography and
the Shape of a Life. He has recently published ‘Mill’s Autobiography as Literature’,
in The Blackwell Companion to John Stuart Mill (Blackwell, 2015) and is currently
writing Good Lives about autobiography and well-being. Earlier articles discussed
autobiographies as ethical reflection and the autobiographies of Mill and Edmund
Gosse.