Description
Book SynopsisThis book provides a philosophical assessment of the idea of personhood advanced in popular self-help literature. It also traces, within academic philosophy and philosophical scholarship, a self-help culture where the self is brought forth as an object of improvement and a key to meaning, progress, and profundity.
Unlike other academic treatments of the topic of self-help, this book is not primarily concerned with providing a critique of popular self-help and self-transformative practices. Rather, it is concerned with how they work to shape contemporary forms and ideals of moral personhood and are conducive to moral renegotiation and change. The book consists of two parts with somewhat different argumentative strategies. Part 1 consists of an overview and reassessment of popular self-help literature and its sociological and journalistic critics, written from a moral philosophical perspective. Part 2 opens with discussion of the current attraction, among a range of philosopher
Trade Review
"Hämäläinen’s book is unique in bringing out how popular self-help literature not only reflects but also shapes contemporary forms and ideals of moral personhood, being a place of constant moral renegotiation; an insight bought in dialogue with her clear analysis of philosophical concerns with self-transformation."
Anne-Marie S. Christensen, University of Southern Denmark
Table of Contents1. Introduction Part 1: Reading the Self-help Culture 2. What is Self-help? 3. Plural Histories of Self-help 4. Self-help and Governmentality 5. We Have Always Been Governed Part 2: Philosophy as a Self-transformative Practice 6. Transformative Hopes in Philosophy 7. Pierre Hadot – Philosophy as a Spiritual Practice 8. Foucault’s Two Faces? 9. Murdoch’s Platonic Ascent 10. Wittgenstein’s Therapy 11. Cavell’s Ethics of Becoming 12. Ways Forward
