Whole Lives, Time, and Selfhood

This workshop will explore the value and implications of viewing (thinking about, considering, experiencing, appreciating, recognizing) one's life as a whole. It seems to be a characteristic feature of human experience that we are capable of taking both an extended and a temporally-local perspective on our lives.  Discussions in many disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and economics have noted tensions that can arise as a result of these dual perspectives.  Phenomena like temporal discounting, in which we seem to prefer smaller present rewards over larger rewards in the future appear to be a form of irrationality that involves privileging present well-being over that of one’s whole life.  On the other side, it is often observed that people can become so focused on past events or future plans that they fail to truly experience the present and miss out on much that life has to offer.  This workshop will ask what it means to understand a life as a whole. Is a ‘whole life’ more than just a mere aggregate, and if so, what does this ‘more’ consist in? How does, or should, whole-of-life holism alter our evaluations and influence the conduct of our lives? 

Schedule:

Monday 19th February

9am Welcome

9:15-10am Marya Schechtman (University of Illinois at Chicago), “Glad It Happened: Narrative and Ethical Depth"

10am-10:45 Chad Stevenson (University of Melbourne), “The Shape of a Life and the Plays We Make”

10:45-11:00 Morning tea

11:00-11:45 James Watt (Deakin University), “The Phenomenal Experience of ‘Being Oneself’”

11:45-12:30 Richard Heersmink (Macquarie University), “Narrative selves, distributed memory, and evocative objects”

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:15 Kerstin Knight (University of Melbourne), “Narrating the End”

2:15-3:00 Natasha Lushetich (LaSalle College of the Arts), “I am a Habit”

3:00-3:15 Afternoon tea

3:15-4:00 Abel Franco (California State University Northridge), “The Emotional Response to Our Life as a Whole”

Tuesday 20th February

9:15-10am Adam Neikerk (Westfield State University), “To what extent is morality produced by time?”

10am-10:45 Desma Lawrence (University of Melbourne), “Literature, Lives and Moral Evaluation”

10:45-11:00 Morning tea

11:00-11:45 Chris McCarrol (Macquarie University), “Rewarding One's Future Self”

11:45-12:30 Dan Weijers (University of Waikato),  “A puzzle about privileging our future hedonic states”

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:15 Andrew Inkpin (University of Melbourne), “What makes Heideggerian Authenticity a Story Worth Telling?”

2:15-3:00 Abubakr Kahn (ITU Lahore), “Experiencing the Future in the Now”

3:00-3:15 Afternoon tea

3:15-4:00 Patrick Stokes (Deakin University), “Whole Lives and Final Goods”

Hosted by the Philosophy and the History of Ideas group and the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University.