Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-22T02:46:30.126Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Personal Ideals as Metaphors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

NICK RIGGLE
NICK RIGGLE*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGOnriggle@sandiego.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

What is it to have and act on a personal ideal? Someone who aspires to be a philosopher might imaginatively think ‘I am a philosopher’ by way of motivating herself to think hard about a philosophical question. But doing so seems to require her to act on an inaccurate self-description, given that she is not yet what she regards herself as being. J. David Velleman develops the thought that action-by-ideal involves a kind of fictional self-conception. My aim is to expand our thinking about personal ideals by developing another way of understanding them. On this view action-by-ideal involves a kind of metaphorical self-conception. I investigate some salient differences between these views with the aim of understanding the different perspectives they take on the rationality of action-by-ideal. Where the fiction view runs into problems of literary coherence, the metaphor view exploits the richness of poetic invention. But action-by-ideal is a complex phenomenon about which there may be no tidy story to be told. This paper is an attempt to clarify and understand more of this messy terrain.

Keywords

personal idealsmake-believemetaphoractionrationality
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , Fall 2017 , pp. 265 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Elizabeth. (1993) Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Google Scholar
Camp, Elisabeth. (2008) ‘ Showing, Telling, and Seeing: Metaphor and Poetic Language’. The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, vol. 3: A Figure of Speech, 1–24.Google Scholar
Camp, Elisabeth. (2009) ‘Two Varieties of Literary Imagination’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 33, 107–30.Google Scholar
Callard, Agnes. (2016) ‘Proleptic Reasons’. In Shafer-Landau, Russ (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 129–154.Google Scholar
Cohen, Ted. (1976) ‘Notes on Metaphor’. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 34, 249–59.Google Scholar
Cott, Jonathan. (2017) Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. New York: Simon & Schuster, 54.Google Scholar
Davidson, Donald. (1978) ‘What Metaphors Mean’. Critical Inquiry, 5, 31–47.Google Scholar
Fischer, Jeremy. (2012) ‘Being Proud and Feeling Proud: Character, Emotion, and the Moral Psychology of Personal Ideals’. Journal of Value Inquiry, 46, 209–22.Google Scholar
Frankfurt, Harry. (2004) The Reasons of Love. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Moran, Richard. (1989). ‘Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force’. Critical Inquiry, 16, 87–112.Google Scholar
Riggle, Nick. (2015a) ‘Personal Style and Artistic Style’. The Philosophical Quarterly, 65, 711–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riggle, Nick. (2015b) ‘On the Aesthetic Ideal’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 55, 433–47.Google Scholar
Riggle, Nick. (2016) ‘On the Interest in Beauty and Disinterest’. Philosophers’ Imprint, 16, 1–14.Google Scholar
Velleman, David. (2000) ‘On the Aim of Belief’. In Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 244–281.Google Scholar
Velleman, David. (2006a) ‘Motivation by Ideal’. In Velleman, Self to Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 312–329.Google Scholar
Velleman, David. (2006b) ‘Willing the Law’. In Velleman, Self to Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 330–360.Google Scholar
Velleman, David. (2006c) ‘Identification and Identity’. In Velleman, Self to Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 67.Google Scholar
Whitman, Walt. (2007) Leaves of Grass. Mineola, NY: Dover.Google Scholar