Introduction: What Is a Philosophy of Autobiography?

, 2015; online edn, Chicago Scholarship Online , 19 May 2016 ), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0001, accessed 12 Sept. 2024.

Cowley, Christopher (ed.). "Introduction: What Is a Philosophy of Autobiography?." In The Philosophy of Autobiography . Edited by Christopher Cowley (ed.). University of Chicago Press , 2015 . Chicago Scholarship Online , 2016 . https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226268088.003.0001.

Extract

We seem to be living through a boom in autobiographical writing. Every half-famous celebrity now seems to have access to publishers and readerships; politicians seem to make a lot more money from their memoirs (and lecture tours) than they did in office; sports heroes and their fans can relive the glory in much greater detail than the visual; and every non-celebrity can create voluble social media sites and blogs without any limits to vanity or banality or shame. Among the scholarly community, there has been a fair amount of recent interest among literary theorists in the genre of autobiography and “life writing.” 1 And of course psychologists and psychotherapists have long been interested in their patients’ efforts at self-disclosure. However, there has been very little direct, theoretical and systematic interest from philosophers, and as such this volume hopes to fill that gap.

One of the reasons philosophers have perhaps not been interested is that they have already been preoccupied with many of the elements of autobiographical thinking, understanding and telling. The purest case of autobiography, after all, could be Rene Descartes’ Meditations, with its punctual, disembodied self outside time and space, describing his mental states at that moment. But in addition to the problem of skepticism, philosophers have long been interested in the nature of the self, in the problems of interpreting and understanding, in the paradoxes of self-deception, and in the meaning and narrative structure of human lives. So this volume may be less about filling a gap than about bringing together a number of long-standing debates. 2