Autonomy, Authenticity, and the Self

Professor Mark Wrathall (University of California, Riverside)

**** Please note that the date of this seminar has changed. It will now be held on Wednesday June 26 ****

I'm interested in two ways that the self enters into accounts of human action.  According to what I'll call "the autonomy thesis," a bodily movement or change only counts as an action if it stands in the right kind of relationship to the self.  According to what I'll call "the authenticity thesis," it is an ideal of human existence to act in a way that is true to the self.  There are a variety of different ways to fill in the details of each account -- different ways, that is, to conceive of the "right" relationship of a bodily movement to the self, or of what it means to be "true" to the self.  In this paper, I explore the existential-phenomenological approach to autonomy, which departs in significant ways from more conventional analytic accounts of agency.  Understanding this model of autonomy is the basis for explaining Heidegger's account of authenticity as self-constancy, an ideal implicit in autonomy itself.

Mark A. Wrathall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.  He is considered a leading interpreter of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and is the author of Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, History (2010) and How to Read Heidegger (2005). He is also the editor or co-editor of numerous collections, including A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (2006), A Companion to Heidegger (2005), and Religion after Metaphysics (2003).