This paper examines epistemic injustice in knowledge production concerning autism. Its aim is to further our understanding of the distinctive shapes of the kinds of epistemic injustices against autists. The paper shows how Ian Hacking’s work on autistic autobiography brings into view a form of hermeneutical injustice that autists endure with respect to their firsthand accounts of their experiences of autism. It explores how understanding the distinctive shape of this hermeneutical injustice can help us further appreciate dangers and harms (...) of using interpretive frameworks for autistic experience that neglect autists’ own contributions to the formation of words and concepts for capturing their experiences. In particular, the paper argues that even when autists are included in knowledge production concerning autistic experience, they remain vulnerable to forms of hermeneutical marginalization that can stifle the coming into being of autistic experience. (shrink)

In this fascinating autobiography from the foremost genius of twentieth-century physics, Max Planck tells the story of his life, his aims, and his thinking. Published posthumously, the papers in this volume were written for the general reader and make accessible his scientific theories as well as his philosophical ideals, including his thoughts on ethics and morals. Max (Karl Ernst Ludwig) Planck was a German physicist and philosopher known for his quantum theory, for which he won the Nobel Prize in (...) Physics in 1918. Planck was born in Kiel, Germany, in 1858 to an academic family, and he valued education from a young age. He attended the Universities of Munich and Berlin to study physics under the great scientific leaders Kirchhoff and Helmholtz. His early work mainly focused on the study of thermodynamics, and in 1900 he published a paper on his quantum theory that would change the face of modern physics. Planck worked as a professor at Berlin University his entire life, and he also served as the president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Promotion of Science. During World War II, Planck experienced great hardships while he remained in Germany but openly opposed the Nazi regime. One of his two sons was executed during this time for an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life, and Planck's home in Berlin was eventually bombed. He continued to write on physics and philosophy until his death in 1947. (shrink)

This early work by Robin G. Collingwood was originally published in 1939 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'An Autobiography' is the story of Collingwood's personal and academic life. Robin George Collingwood was born on 22nd February 1889, in Cartmel, England. He was the son of author, artist, and academic, W. G. Collingwood. He was greatly influenced by the Italian Idealists Croce, Gentile, and Guido de Ruggiero. Another important influence was his father, a (...) professor of fine art and a student of Ruskin. He published many works of philosophy, such as Speculum Mentis (1924), An Essay on Philosophic Method (1933), and An Essay on Metaphysics (1940). (shrink)

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 and died in 1970. One of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, he transformed philosophy and can lay claim to being one of the greatest philosophers of all time. He was a Nobel Prize winner for Literature and was imprisoned several times as a result of his pacifism. His views on religion, education, sex, politics and many other topics, made him one of the most read and revered writers of the age. This, (...) his autobiography, is one of the most compelling and vivid ever written. This one-volume, compact paperback edition contains an introduction by the politician and scholar, Michael Foot, which explores the status of this classic nearly 30 years after the publication of the final volume. (shrink)

This chapter presents an autobiography of P. F. Strawson. It details his family background, education, military career, and career as an academic philosopher. Strawson also briefly talks about his religious and political beliefs.

Autobiography and Teacher Development in China investigates the roles of autobiography in teacher education, as several scholars in China recontextualize Western conceptions of teacher development, combining them with uniquely Chinese cultural conceptions to articulate a reconceptualization of teacher development that holds worldwide significance. Framed by the work of Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar, these theoretical and practical essays point to an internationally inflected reconceptualization of teachers' professional development, pre-service and in-service. This volume addresses multiple movements of teacher (...) education reform worldwide, focused on crafting a nationally distinctive course not only internationally, but also culturally, historically, and locally. (shrink)

Millions of spiritual seekers consider Paramhansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi their Gita or Bible of self-realization―a journey to discover our body, mind and soul’s oneness with God’s omnipresence. Oswald Pereira in this book captures both the essence of the autobiography and Yogananda’s core teachings. The author analyses the autobiography in the first part of the book, while in the second part, he evaluates Yogananda’s philosophy of universalism, unity and oneness of people and of religions and discusses (...) the parallelisms between Krishna and Christ’s teachings, Kriya Yoga’s scientific technique of God-contact, and various other aspects of God. He compares Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda’s philosophy of universalism with that of Yogananda. Yogananda’s metaphysical gyan helps us to renew God-contact and rediscover the joy within. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell remains one of the greatest philosophers and most complex and controversial figures of the twentieth century. Here, in this frank, humorous and decidedly charming autobiography, Russell offers readers the story of his life – introducing the people, events and influences that shaped the man he was to become. Originally published in three volumes in the late 1960s, _Autobiography_ by Bertrand Russell is a revealing recollection of a truly extraordinary life written with the vivid freshness and clarity that (...) has made Bertrand Russell’s writings so distinctively his own. (shrink)

Exploring the connections between autobiography and postmodernism, this book addresses self-representation in a variety of literatures - Native American, British, Chicana, immigrant, and lesbian, among others - in genres as diverse as poetry, naming, confession, photography, and the manifesto. The essays examine how different writers respond to the culturally specific pressures of genre, how these constraints are negotiated, and what self-representation reveals about the politics of identity.

Most philosophical writing is impersonal and argumentative, but many important philosophers have nevertheless written accounts of their own lives. Filling a gap in the market for a text focusing on autobiography as philosophy, this collection discusses several such autobiographies in the light of their authors' broader work, and considers whether there are any philosophical tasks for which life accounts are particularly appropriate. Instead of the common impersonal and argumentative forms of ordinary philosophical discussion, these autobiographical texts are deeply personal (...) and largely narrative or explanatory. The contributors to this book examine the philosophical significance of philosophers’ autobiographies and whether or not there are broadly philosophical tasks for which this sort of writing is particularly suited. _Autobiography as Philosophy_ contains a general discussion about the relation between philosophical and autobiographical writing, and essays on the specific writings of Augustine, Abelard, Montaigne, Descartes, Vico, Hume, Rousseau, Newman, Mill, Nietzsche, Collingwood and Russell by specialists on the works of these individuals. Original and distinctive in its efforts to think about the writings of historically recognized philosophers as communicative acts governed by their own distinctive interests and purposes, the book reveals that it is as much about the texts and the authors as it is about their doctrines and arguments. As a result the book steps back from many of the issues of substantive philosophical discussion to reflect on certain forms of writing as means to philosophical ends, to consider what those ends have included. (shrink)

The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico is significant both as a source of insight into the influences on the eighteenth-century philosopher's intellectual development and as one of the earliest and most sophisticated examples of philosophical autobiography. Referring to himself in the third person, Vico records the course of his life and the influence that various thinkers had on the development of concepts central to his mature work. Beyond its relevance to the development of the New Science, the Autobiography (...) is also of interest for the light it sheds on Italian culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Still regarded by many as the best English-language translation of this classic work, the Cornell edition was widely lauded when first published in 1944. Wrote the Saturday Review of Literature: "Here was something new in the art of self-revelation. Vico wrote of his childhood, the psychological influences to which he was subjected, the social conditions under which he grew up and received an education and evolved his own way of thinking. It was so outstanding a piece of work that it was held up as a model, which it still is.". (shrink)

Ecce Homo: Nietzsches Autobiography by Friedrich Nietzsche. Ecce Homo is the last prose work that Nietzsche wrote. It is true that the pamphlet Nietzsche contra Wagner was prepared a month later than the Autobiography; but we cannot consider this pamphlet as anything more than a compilation, seeing that it consists entirely of aphorisms drawn from such previous works as Joyful Wisdom, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, etc. Coming at the end of a year in which (...) he had produced the Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist, Ecce Homo is not only a coping-stone worthy of the wonderful creations of that year, but also a fitting conclusion to his whole life, in the form of a grand summing up of his character as a man, his purpose as a reformer, and his achievement as a thinker. As if half conscious of his approaching spiritual end, Nietzsche here bids his friends farewell, just in the manner in which, in the Twilight of the Idols (Aph. 36, Part ix.), he declares that every one should be able to take leave of his circle of relatives and intimates when his time seems to have come-that is to say, while he is still himself while he still knows what he is about, and is able to measure his own life and life in general, and speak of both in a manner which is not vouchsafed to the groaning invalid, to the man lying on his back, decrepit and exhausted, or to the moribund victim of some wasting disease. (shrink)

An autobiographic instinct may be as old as Man Writing; but only since 1800 has Western Man placed a premium on autobiography. A bibliography of all autobiographic writing prior to that time would be a small fascicule; a bibliography since 1800 a thick tome. The ground behind this simpleminded assertion of a quantitative measure cannot be explained away by easy reference to the mass literacy of the modern world or the greater ease of publishing. It is as much a (...) fact of cultural conditions as is the significant relation of rhetoric to the intense public mindedness of classical men, the relative insignificance of tragedy in a thoroughly Christianized world view, the disappearance of epic from a nonaristocratic world, or the powerful assertion of the novel in an age of burghers. The usage of the term "autobiography" itself is suggestive, although this mode of historical explanation is always defective in the sense that such older terms as "hypomnemata," "commentarii," "vita," "confessions," or "memoirs" may well have covered the functions subsequently encapsulated in a newly fashionable term. In German the term makes its appearance shortly before 1800; the Oxford English Dictionary attributes first English usage to Southey in an article on Portuguese literature from the year 1809. Karl J. Weintraub, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of History and dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, is the author of Visions of Culture and numerous articles. His introduction to a new edition of Goethe's Autobiography will prove of special interest to our readers. (shrink)

Russell writes with wit, candor, and uncommon honesty about his Victorian childhood, his painful adolescence, and his extracurricular amorous conquests. On the credit side, it must be said that it offers a remarkable insight into the development of a remarkable man. But for the benefit of those with more than a casual interest in the philosopher named Bertrand Russell, it should be mentioned that this book suffers from chronic intellectual malnutrition. Not that there isn't a lot of name-dropping and folksy (...) correspondence between the intellectual giants of the early twentieth century. There is a perfectly mad letter from Georg Cantor, who refers to Kant as "this abominable mummy"; and a perfectly charming one from Norbert Weiner's father, who, by way of introduction, states that his son has studied philosophy under "professors Royce, Perry, Palmer, Munsterberg, Schmidt, Holt, etc." In a delicious jest, Russell adds as a footnote, "Nevertheless he turned out well." There is, however, nothing substantial about philosophy in this book. At its close, Russell had completed Principia. He had returned to Cambridge already a most important figure in philosophy and mathematics. But there is no real discussion of the ideas which led up to and leavened this period in Russell's life. There is instead the dreary story of Whitehead's financial troubles. One hopes that a proper sense of the importance of things will be restored in future volumes of Russell's autobiography.—H. P. K. (shrink)

Published in 1951, the Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri is a classic work in the genre that he began writing when he was about 50 and covers years from his birth in 1897 to 1921 when his student days came to an end. The book made him well-known across the English-speaking literary world mainly because of the quality of its prose and the scope of its concerns. It is ambivalently dedicated to the “British Empire in (...) India,” which touched everything in the lives of Indians and “conferred subjecthood” on them but “withheld citizenship.” The preface of the book says that it will be a “story of the struggle of a civilization with a hostile environment, in which the destiny of British rule in India became necessarily involved.”. (shrink)

An examination of the genre of philosophical autobiography sheds light on the role of personal judgment alongside objective rationality in philosophy. Building on Monk's conception of philosophical biography, philosophical autobiography can be seen as any autobiography that reveals some interplay between life and thought. It is argued that almost all autobiographies by philosophers are philosophical because the recounting of one's own life is almost invariably a form of extended speech act of self-revelation. When a philosopher is the (...) autobiographer, this self-revelation illuminates the interplay between thought, life, and personality. Understanding how this works allows us to address three problems of biography raised by Honderich: how to give an account of something as large and complex as a human life; how a life-story is also a judgment; and how we can justify identifying one part of a causal circumstance as 'the cause'. There is also a new ethical problem raised about the autobiographer's right to make public details of a shared private life. (shrink)

In making the condition for its own possibility its deepest concern, philosophy is necessarily about itself—it is autobiographical. The first part of The Autobiography of Philosophy interprets Heidegger's Being and Time, Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, Aristotle's Metaphysics, and Plato's Lysis as examples of the implicitly autobiographical character of philosophy. The second part is a reading of Rousseau's The Reveries of the Solitary Walker.

The work of Jacques Derrida can be seen to reinvent most theories. In this book Robert Smith offers both a reading of the philosophy of Derrida and an investigation of current theories of autobiography. Smith argues that for Derrida autobiography is not so much subjective self-revelation as relation to the other, not so much a general condition of thought as a general condition of writing - what Derrida calls the 'autobiography of the writing' - which mocks any (...) self-centred finitude of living and dying. In this context, and using literary-critical, philosophical, and psychoanalytical sources, Smith thinks through Derrida's texts in a new, but distinctly Derridean, way, and finds new perspectives to analyse the work of classical writers including Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, and de Man. (shrink)

We emerge into everythingness. The senses mingle incestuously. Nothing is distinct or differentiated. Everything is no-thing. How is it we come to be as distinct entities? Let me personalize: In what manner did I become an "I"? Is the motive force behind this much-maligned, much-altered, much-abused body my soul? my genes? me?

It is common for stand-up comedians to tell stories as well as, or instead of, jokes. Stories bring something extra to the performance, and when presented as true add a further layer of appeal. However, most stories told as if true by comedians are not true. A categorizing of forms of comedic story is presented involving the dimensions of grammatical person and truthfulness. Some advantages of comedians’ employing true first-person stories are discussed, and these considerations are then explored through the (...) role of autobiography in the work of Doug Stanhope. Many aspects of Stanhope’s (highly unusual) life find their way into his shows, and true stories and his personality more broadly are folded into other elements of his act (such as his political views). Links are made with Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of “inwardness,” and it’s argued that authenticity is a prerequisite for the quality of self-disclosure that is basic to Stanhope’s excellence. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to report on the experiences built up from the application of dietary autobiographies and the construction of generative questions as an active teaching-learning method carried out in a didactic sequence with undergraduate nutrition students at a Brazilian north-eastern public university. This is a report on teaching practice involving high school and undergraduate nutrition students. Between 2022.2 and 2024.1, 60 didactic stages were carried out, involving theoretical and practical activities with 41 adolescent students and 150 (...) undergraduates. The academics‘ active reading of the 41 adolescents’ dietary autobiographies produced 32 generating questions for Food and Nutrition Education with adolescents. We consider this methodological approach based on dietary autobiographies to be powerful for the critical development of adolescents about the food and nutritional issues they experience and for the training of professional nutritionists involved in transformative actions in Food and Nutrition Education with adolescents. (shrink)

When the French philosopher Sarah Kofman committed suicide in 1994 she left behind an impressive oeuvre in which both the autobiographical genre and the treatment of women play a central role. Her theoretical re ections on both topics situate themselves in the interstices between psychoanalysis, feminism and deconstruction and share a common concern: the respect of alterity in all its guises. Kofman's resistance to the authoritative claim of the retrospective closure underlying traditional autobiographies is closely related to her celebration of (...) an e ®criture parricide, a mode of writing which undoes the repression of multiplicity and otherness. Shortly before her death Kofman published an autobiographical account of her own childhood years after the deportation and death of her father in a concentration camp. This article addresses the striking discrepancies between the theoretical positions Kofman defends throughout her philosophical writings and the autobiographical turn of her own last words. (shrink)

R.G.Collingwood's Autobiography is the next of Collingwood's books to be revised for a new edition by Oxford University Press.It will include new manuscript material, include his Log of a Journey to the East Indies In addition there will be a number of scholarly essays relating Collingwood's ideas to his life and broader concerns.It is opportune to make available in English two introductions to the German and Romanian editions of An Autobiography.

In “Autobiography as Mystery: Father Brown and the Case of G.K. Chesterton,” Chene Heady argues that G.K. Chesterton’s Autobiography (1936) complicates common scholarly assumptions about both genre and literary authorship. The popular Edwardian writer G.K. Chesterton produced an improbably vast and diffuse literary oeuvre. Chesterton’s scholarly advocates have typically defending him by redefining him in more specialized and more manageable terms; he becomes either the sage-like nonfiction writer who wrote Orthodoxy or the mystery writer who invented Father Brown. (...) However, Chesterton himself derided the cult of the expert, and mocked the tendency towards literary specialization as elitist. In his Autobiography, he refuses basic genre distinctions by insisting that the work should be read as a detective novel; the work’s climax reverses the relationship between creator and creation, as Father Brown solves the mystery of G.K Chesterton. By making this structural equation between autobiography and mystery, Chesterton asserts the fundamental identity between these hermeneutical enterprises. The Autobiography ultimately posits a fundamental equivalence between all the cultural practices by which we find meaning in the world around us, a premise that serves both to justify Chesterton’s eclectic model of authorship and to enable him to hope for cultural unity in deeply divided interwar Britain. (shrink)

Jaspers’s autobiography presents reflection upon the career and work of one of Germany’s leading existential philosophers. He describes briefly his early life and offers reflection upon his study and work in psychiatry. One can readily find the seeds of his later philosophical reflections evident in his General Psychopathology. Jaspers also presents illuminating discussion of his academic career, his political reflections, and comments upon the relationship of his philosophical analysis to his theological orientation. He offers extended discussion of each of (...) his major philosophical books, with insight into the origin and intentions of each volume. In addition, he presents valuable comments upon the philosophical climate of Germany against which he succeeded in reacting with vigor. Special attention is given to Rickert and E. Mayer. His rather detailed description of his relationship with Heidegger is especially illuminating. Although both of these thinkers played a leading role in the development and elaboration of German existentialism, there has been little direct and explicit consideration of the works of one by the other, or comments upon their "Being-With." Jaspers tells of his early and friendly relationship with Heidegger, their long working conversations, how their thought wandered down different pathways, and his reaction to Heidegger’s involvement in the rise of National Socialism. He also writes of his reaction to Heidegger’s Being and Time, of his unfulfilled intention to write seriously upon this work, and of how divorced his own thought was from Heidegger’s way, so that it did not even affect his own philosophical development. He describes the gradual cooling of the early friendship, and the eventual cessation of the long conversations and visits. All of the above offers a more intimate glimpse into the intersubjectivity of two of Europe’s leading thinkers, as seen by one of the participants, than has been readily available to the Western public to date. Perhaps someday there will be a publication of whatever Jaspers-Heidegger correspondence remains extant.—H.A.D. (shrink)

Bibliography (p. xxiv-xxv)--Autobiography.--Thoughts on poetry and its varieties.--Bentham.--Coleridge.--Nature.--On liberty.

In this fascinating autobiography from one of the foremost geniuses of twentieth-century physics, Max Planck tells the story of his life, his aims, and his thinking. Published posthumously, the papers in this volume were written for the general reader and make accessible Planck's scientific theories as well as his philosophical ideals, including his thoughts on ethics and morals.

Thoreau’s Walden is often disregarded as a philosophical work in academic circles because of its literary form and paucity of formal argumentation. I demonstrate that Walden is a philosophical work by relating its method to Kant’s in the Critique of Pure Reason, and I show that Walden’s literary genre—autobiography as critique—is a function of the work’s philosophical intent: to produce a philosophical instrument of lifeworldly experience. I ascribe to Thoreau a modified Kantian transcendental method by which he investigates the (...) conditions of the possibility of life as such, making the transition from Kant’s “experience”(Erfahrung) as the spatiotemporal and causal ground of the sciences to Dilthey’s “experience”(Erlebnis) as including the category of life and autobiographical and historical consciousness. I highlight a number of passages where this philosophical substance of Walden becomes clear, and I appeal to …. (shrink)

In this autobiography, Fellmann’s personal experiences obtain in the light of philosophical themes a general significance. His connections to famous authors from the past and present situate his thought in a historical context. The focus of his Philosophy of Life is Eros; the Erosopher is the one who shares his wisdom of living. This book appeals to a broad public interested in the contemporary currents of philosophical reflection.

Au XVIe siècle, l’autobiographie et le récit de voyage étaient étroitement liés et suivirent pendant quelques décennies une évolution parallèle. Thomas Platter l’aîné essaya de fournir dans ses Mémoires la description d’une vie exemplaire retraçant ses expériences multiples sur les routes d’Europe. Son fils Felix nous laissa un ouvrage disparate (un mélange de journal, de récit de voyage et de mémoires) où l’auteur paraît omniprésent. Sa conception de l’écriture autobiographique rappelle celle de Montaigne. Le jeune frère Thomas suivit rigoureusement les (...) règles émises par les théoriciens du voyage, condamnant toute opinion subjective. Les ouvrages des Platter nous donnent le meilleur exemple de l’évolution du genre (auto-)biographique entre la Renaissance classique et le Baroque dit sauvage. (shrink)

The presence of interpretation according to different perspectives in art forms in which we expect the 'truth' about the subject matter, provides an opportunity to understand what truth means in the context of perspectivism, the view that there is no objective standard of truth free from any perspective against which we can measure the veracity of an account. In this article, I explore perspectival truth through Nietzsche's philosophical autobiography, Ecce Homo , and Herzog's films, particularly Little Dieter Needs to (...) Fly. I argue that these artworks both contribute to and exemplify a perspectival truth practice. (shrink)

Examines philosophical autobiography as a literary genre and an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis.

Women entering the performing arts, particularly theatre and studio spaces, in 20th-century India navigated a patriarchal and hierarchically structured sphere marked by systemic gendered exploitation. Moreover, the stigma surrounding women’s participation in public performance rendered them subjects of social disapproval and moral scrutiny. This article argues that, despite such stigma and the hierarchical power structures that characterised the performing arts in 20th-century India, networks of care enabled early women performers to enter and sustain careers in this field. Drawing on the (...) autobiographies of Kanan Devi and Zohra Segal, pioneers of Indian theatre and cinema, the study explores how their narratives of everyday trials are interwoven with accounts of supportive relationships that shaped their artistic journeys and resilience. The analysis situates these relational dynamics within the broader framework of the ethics of care. However, given the Western-centric orientation of care ethics and its tendency to prioritise gender at the expense of other intersecting identities, the study adopts an intersectional approach that grounds care in performers’ caste, class and gendered experiences in 20th-century India. In doing so, it contributes to feminist scholarship on the significance of relationality and community in advancing women’s empowerment and extending care ethics beyond its Global North foundations. (shrink)

Mill schrieb seine Lebensgeschichte 1853–1854 nieder, als er seinen nahen Tod durch Tuberkulose befürchtete. Die Autobiographie sollte an der Spitze einer Essaysammlung als John Stuart und Harriet TaylorTaylor, Harriet Mills geistiges Vermächtnis stehen. Er überarbeitete sie in Zusammenarbeit mit seiner Frau und ergänzte sie zweimal nach ihrem Tod (1861, 1869–1870). Sie wurde letztendlich von Harriets Tochter Helen TaylorTaylor, Helen posthum 1873 publiziert. Die aktuelle Standardausgabe bildet den ersten Band der Collected Works von Robson und Stillinger und druckt die erste und (...) letzte Version parallel ab. Mit dieser Position im Gesamtwerk erfüllen die Herausgeber die Intentionen der Verfasser: Die Autobiographie dient als Einführung wie Begründung seiner Schriften, denn sie entwirft Mills Entwicklung als Ideengeschichte von Einflüssen und deren Verarbeitung. Umgekehrt strukturieren Mills zentrale Theorien intertextuell seine eigene Lebensgeschichte. (shrink)

Der Band bietet die erstmalige Edition der handschriftlich überlieferten Autobiographie des mystischen Spiritualisten Friedrich Breckling (1629-1711). Die Quelle, die detailliert kommentiert wird, enthält exakte genealogische Daten zu Brecklings familiären Verhältnissen sowie zu seinem Lebenslauf und gibt u.a. Aufschluss über die Beschaffenheit von Brecklings dichtem Kommunikationsnetz. Autobiographie, Chronik und apokalyptischer Traktat verbinden sich in dieser Schrift zu einer literarischen Mischgattung, die unter den frühneuzeitlichen "Ego-Dokumenten" eine wenn nicht einzigartige, so doch besondere Stellung einnehmen dürfte. Detaillierte Register erschließen das Werk.

Influential libertarians from diverse backgrounds and professions who have worked toward a freer society across the globe share their personal and intellectual journeys, including what their lives and thoughts were before they embraced libertarianism; which people, texts, or events most inspired them; what experiences, challenges, tribulations, and achievements they have had as participants or leaders in this movement, and how this philosophy has affected their private and professional lives. The volume’s 80 contributors span the political-philosophical spectrum of libertarianism, including anarcho-capitalists, (...) monarchists, constitutionalists, classical liberals, and thick libertarians. Their essays express different perspectives on many issues even while articulating such core principles as an appreciation for individual liberty, private property rights, the rule of law, and free enterprise. Together, they represent myriad individual journeys toward libertarianism, however defined. By bringing together a range of contemporary voices from outside the dominant left-right paradigm, this book aims to contribute to the viewpoint diversity that is crucially needed in today’s public discourse. These autobiographies not only offer compelling insights into their individual authors and the state of the world today, but may also inspire the next generation to make our society a freer one. (shrink)

Cet article se propose de préciser la relation entre l'épanouissement de l'autobiographie allemande de la fin du XVIIIe siècle et l'essor de la bourgeoisie en s'appuyant sur la notion de carrière de Luhmann. Cette notion rend compte de la nécessité pour l'individu, dans la société fonctionnelle bourgeoise, de trouver une identité personnelle et sociale grâce à la description de sa vie sous forme orale ou écrite. L'autobiographie de Jung-Stilling, publiée au fur et à mesure de son ascension sociale, montre bien (...) le rôle extraordinaire de ce récit dans la constitution de l'identité et l'amélioration des chances pratiques de son auteur. Au contraire, le roman psychologique, Anton Reiser, de K. P. Moritz décrit l'impossibilité du héros à poursuivre une carrière et à construire son identité à cause de son imagination débordante. L'autobiographie du XVIIIe siècle s'avère ainsi être l'autopoïesis littéraire de l'individualité concrète de ses auteurs. (shrink)

The concept of human nature implies the existence of something objective in that it concerns features that are held to characterise the human being as such. These essential features can then be used to explain human psychology and behaviour. Yet our access to human nature, assuming that there is such a thing, has a subjective dimension in so far as the identification of these features is undertaken from the standpoint of the individual who infers what they are, both from his (...) or her own thoughts and behaviour and from the thoughts and behaviour of others. I highlight this subjective dimension and use it to show how a theory of human nature can function as a type of self-justification by examining Rousseau’s claims concerning the value of his own autobiography, the Confessions, as a guide to human nature in connection with one incident described in it. This incident reflects the primacy of self-love in relation to pity that follows from Rousseau’s theory of human nature. (shrink)

Au xvie siècle, l’autobiographie et le récit de voyage étaient étroitement liés et suivirent pendant quelques décennies une évolution parallèle. Thomas Platter l’aîné essaya de fournir dans sesMémoires la description d’une vie exemplaire retraçant ses expériences multiples sur les routes d’Europe. Son fils Felix nous laissa un ouvrage disparate (un mélange de journal, de récit de voyage et de mémoires) où l’auteur paraît omniprésent. Sa conception de l’écriture autobiographique rappelle celle de Montaigne. Le jeune frère Thomas suivit rigoureusement les règles (...) émises par les théoriciens du voyage, condamnant toute opinion subjective. Les ouvrages des Platter nous donnent le meilleur exemple de l’évolution du genre (auto-)biographique entre la Renaissance classique et le Baroque dit sauvage. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill was one of the most influential English-language philosophers during the Victorian era. His autobiography recounts his rigorous tutelage under a domineering father, his mental health crisis at age twenty, and his struggle to regain joy amid self-reflection and a reassessment of theories he once believed to be true.

J. S. Mill was the greatest British philosopher of the nineteenth century. Mill's purpose in writing his Autobiography was to set down his own struggle for individuality, and vindicate his life to himself and others.

Les quatre textes qui suivent tentent d'analyser dans la littérature québécoise et française récente les manifestations d'une société en mutation, désireuse ou non de rompre avec les stéréotypes de sexes, de revisiter et réconcilier féminin et masculin. Les écrivaines, avec quelques belles longueurs d'avance, continuent de vouloir à la fois le corps et l'esprit, la vie et la fiction, de jongler avec l'altérité et les identités plurielles et de travailler des textes ûctionnels, théoriques et incamés, qui prennent en compte le (...) réel Leur travail de réflexion et de création ne cesse, en fait, d'interroger les artifices de l'art, les mensonges de la petite et de la grande histoire, et de prouver qu'on ne peut impunément dissocier éthique et esthétique ! Le thème de l'autobiographie foetale qui hante la littérature masculine récente est très représentatif de la masculinité en crise; il cristallise ses angoisses, ses résistances ou sa nouvelle quête émotive, affective et corporelle.The following four-part paper try to analyse in recent quebecer and french littérature the manifestations of a changing society, wether it be willing or not to break with gender stereotypes and reconcile the masculine/feminine dichotomy. Female writers still show leadership in wanting both body and mind, life and fiction; in thinking ofalterity and multiple identities; and in working at fictionnal, theoretical and incarnate texts wich take reality into considerations. Their reflexion and creation in effect never stops questionning the artistic device, the lies of both small and big history to prove that we cannot inconsiderately dissociate Ethics from Esthetics ! The foetal autobiography team now haunting recent male littérature is very representative of the masculinity crisis; it cristallizes his anguish resistances or his new emotive, affective and corporeal quest. (shrink)

The author is convinced that autobiography is revelatory of great cultural movements, and that the Christian faith is historically multi-dimensioned. Tsanoff has a marvelous facility to bring together diverse materials into a conceptual whole. He is capable of making St. Augustine representative of the patristic period and Newman of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. In addition to these two Christian thinkers, Tsanoff portrays St. Teresa of Avila, George Fox, John Bunyan, John Wesley, Ernest Renan, count Tolstoy, (...) Albert Schweitzer, and Pope John XXIII. Each represents what Tsanoff calls an "alternative in Christian experience." And each describes in his own person a significant development in the ongoing life of the Christian community. Tsanoff's Autobiographies can be a very useful book, especially for courses dealing with the history of Christian thought. The author is faithful to the scholarly texts, quoting when necessary, providing anecdotes about the life of a theologian when illuminating. A good, substantial, interesting and helpful volume.--W. A. J. (shrink)