The Practices of the Self


Book Description

Charles Larmore develops a theory of the self that challenges the widespread view that the we always know our own thoughts.




Peace, Culture, and Violence


Book Description

Peace, Culture, and Violence examines deeper sources of violence by providing a critical reflection on the forms of violence that permeate everyday life and our inability to recognize these forms of violence. Exploring the elements of culture that legitimize and normalize violence, the essays collected in this volume invite us to recognize and critically approach the violent aspects of reality we live in and encourage us to envision peaceful alternatives. Including chapters written by important scholars in the fields of Peace Studies and Social and Political Philosophy, the volume represents an endeavour to seek peace in a world deeply marred by violence. Topics include: thug culture, language, hegemony, police violence, war on drugs, war, terrorism, gender, anti-Semitism, and other topics. Contributors are: Amin Asfari, Edward Demenchonok, Andrew Fiala, William Gay, Fuat Gursozlu, Joshua M. Hall , Ron Hirschbein, Todd Jones, Sanjay Lal, Alessandro Rovati, Laleye Solomon Akinyemi, David Speetzen, and Lloyd Steffen.




Practices of the Self and Spiritual Practices


Book Description

In this book Sergey Horujy undertakes a novel comparative analysis of Foucault’s theory of practices of the self and the Eastern Orthodox ascetical tradition of Hesychasm, revealing great affinity between these two radical “subject-less” approaches to anthropology. As he facilitates the dialogue between the two, he offers both an original treatment of ascetical and mystical practices and an up-to-date interpretation of Foucault that goes against the grain of mainstream scholarship. In the second half of the book Horujy transitions from the dialogue with Foucault to his own work of Christian philosophy, rooted in -- but not limited to -- the Eastern Christian philosophical and theological tradition. Horujy’s thinking exemplifies the postsecular nature of our contemporary period and serves as a powerful invitation to think beyond religious-secular divides in philosophy and Eastern-Western divides in intellectual history.




Becoming a New Self


Book Description

In Becoming a New Self, Moshe Sluhovsky examines the diffusion of spiritual practices among lay Catholics in early modern Europe. By offering a close examination of early modern Catholic penitential and meditative techniques, Sluhovsky makes the case that these practices promoted the idea of achieving a new self through the knowing of oneself. Practices such as the examination of conscience, general confession, and spiritual exercises, which until the 1400s had been restricted to monastic elites, breached the walls of monasteries in the period that followed. Thanks in large part to Franciscans and Jesuits, lay urban elites—both men and women—gained access to spiritual practices whose goal was to enhance belief and create new selves. Using Michel Foucault’s writing on the hermeneutics of the self, and the French philosopher’s intuition that the early modern period was a moment of transition in the configurations of the self, Sluhovsky offers a broad panorama of spiritual and devotional techniques of self-formation and subjectivation.




Research Methods for the Self-Study of Practice


Book Description

This is a book designed with the teacher educator in mind. It provides in depth examination of specific methods used effectively in self-study research. The chapters are written by researchers engaged in self-study of their practice.




The Little Book of Self-Healing


Book Description

Find health, wellness, comfort, and recovery with these 200 self-healing techniques designed to nourish the mind, body, and spirit. Self-healing helps you tune into the needs of your mind, body, and spirit to fully understand what you need for optimal health and wellness. With The Little Book of Self-Healing, you’ll find 200 practices that will help you learn to recognize the signs your body gives you, achieve the right balance for your mental and physical needs, and feel empowered as you take an active role in your healing. Whether you’re dealing with the symptoms of extreme stress, coping with traumatic experience, or simply looking to develop a deeper connection with yourself, this book has the tools you need including: -Letting go of the hustle mentality -Finding movement activities that resonate with you -Creating a community of supportive friends -And more! While modern medicine and simple self-care can still be an important part of your health routine, these simple self-healing techniques—taking a bath, meditating, or decluttering—can take your wellness to the next level. Learn how to truly care for yourself and feel your best every day.




The Autonomy of Morality


Book Description

In The Autonomy of Morality, Charles Larmore challenges two ideas that have shaped the modern mind. The world, he argues, is not a realm of value-neutral fact, nor is reason our capacity to impose principles of our own devising on an alien reality. Rather, reason consists in being responsive to reasons for thought and action that arise from the world itself. In particular, Larmore shows that the moral good has an authority that speaks for itself. Only in this light does the true basis of a liberal political order come into view, as well as the role of unexpected goods in the makeup of a life lived well. Charles Larmore is W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. The author of The Morals of Modernity and The Romantic Legacy, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received the Grand Prix de Philosophie from the Académie Française for his book Les pratiques du moi.




The Self as Enterprise


Book Description

Twenty first century, flexible capitalism creates new demands for those who work to acknowledge that all aspects of their lives have come to be seen as performance related, and consequently of interest to those who employ them (or fire them). At the start of the 21st century we can identify, borrowing from Max Weber, new work ethics that provide novel ethically slanted maxims for the conduct of a life, and which suggest that the cultivation of the self as an enterprise is the life-long activity that should give meaning, purpose and direction to a life. The book provides an innovative theoretical and methodological approach that draws on the problematising critique of Michel Foucault, the sociological imagination of Zygmunt Bauman and the work influenced by these authors in social theory and social research in the last three decades. The author takes seriously the ambivalence and irony that marks many people’s experience of their working lives, and the demands of work at the start of the 21st century. The book makes an important contribution to the continuing debate about the nature of work related identities and the consequences of the intensification of the work regimes in which these identities are performed and regulated. In a post global financial crisis (GFC) world of sovereign debt, austerity and recession the author’s analysis focuses academic and professional interest on neo-liberal injunctions to imagine ourselves as an enterprise, and to reap the rewards and carry the costs of the conduct of this enterprise.




50 Mindful Steps to Self-Esteem


Book Description

Sometimes we all need a little lift—something to put the bounce back in our step. If you are like many, you may struggle with self-confidence. You may also compare your successes and failures with those of others. If everything is going well in your life, this tactic may temporarily bolster your sense of self-worth. But what happens when things aren’t going so well? Based on the idea that true self-esteem is grounded in internal, rather than external factors, this book offers 50 easy-to-use mindfulness practices that will help you improve inner awareness and live a more fulfilled life without harsh self-judgment. Mindfulness can help you battle feelings of low self-worth by encouraging you to pay attention to your negative thoughts as they occur, accept them, and ultimately control of how you react to them. The exercises in this pocket-sized book are intended to be simple, brief, and powerful. These are practices to settle into each morning, perhaps before your cup of tea or coffee, and which can be sprinkled throughout the day when you are at work, play, or home. To help you keep track of your thoughts, the book also includes journaling exercises that will help you discover what actions may have led to feelings of positivity or negativity. By focusing on your own awareness and thought processes, you will begin to understand what factors cause you to feel bad about yourself, and honestly assess those factors without giving in to feelings of hopelessness. You will discover that true self-esteem has less to do with what the world is telling you, and has everything to do with what you tell yourself.




Speaking the Truth about Oneself


Book Description

"Speaking the Truth about Oneself is composed of lectures that acclaimed French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered in 1982 at the University of Toronto. As is characteristic of his later work, he is concerned here with the care and cultivation of the self, which becomes the central theme of the second and third volumes of his famous History of Sexuality, published in French in 1984, the month of his death, and which are explored here in a striking and typically illuminating fashion. Throughout his career, Foucault had always been interested in the question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and constitute subjects. But in the last phase of his life, he became especially interested not only in how subjects are constituted by outside forces but in how they constitute themselves. In this lecture series and accompanying seminar, we find Foucault focused on antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman dynasties, and concluding with fourth- and fifth-century Christian monasticism. Foucault's claim is that, in these periods, we see the development of a new kind of act-"speaking the truth" (about oneself)-as the locus of a new form of subjectivity, which he deemed important not just for historical reasons but also as something modernity could harness anew or adapt to its own purposes"--