本論文分析劇作家馬汀麥當納的劇本《枕頭人》中的「說故事」與「自我欺騙」，論證「說故事」提供本劇四位主要角色自我欺騙式的慰藉，使其得以處理創傷和逃避現實。說故事行為裡的想像和詮釋給說者及聽者／讀者機會去重新建立和詮釋悲慘過去，但同時也讓他們陷入自我欺騙的狀態及真實虛幻交錯的混亂，因為說故事可能使他們開始否認進而承認某種身分，甚而處於特定的故事情節結構，即使面對創傷也能獲得自我安慰。論文第二章檢視卡初利安的自我欺騙。卡初力安是劇中的主要說故事者。此章剖析他如何埋頭於自己創造的想像空間，並將過去的傷痛回憶轉化成自己能接受的故事情節。第三章剖析其他三位聽故事者——麥可、塔帕斯基，和艾瑞爾——的自我欺騙。此章論證聽／讀故事亦造成自我欺騙式的安慰。這三人靠詮釋故事為創傷取得自我安慰的解釋，雖然此舉仍然只是對過去的自我欺騙和逃避，但讓他們可以稍微諒解過去，面對現在。說故事行為和自我欺騙深深影響劇中四位角色，並成為他們自我安慰的方法。雖然自我欺騙蒙蔽他們，使他們無視真正的現實，當他們往回看不忍卒睹的過去時，自我欺騙卻可以稍微抒解他們的傷口。 / This thesis analyzes storytelling and self-deception in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, contending that storytelling provides the four main characters in The Pillowman with self-deceptive relief of dealing with their traumas and evading the reality. With the potential of imagination and interpretation, storytelling not only grants storytellers and story-listeners/readers a chance to reconstruct and reinterpret their distressing past, but it also throws them in a state of self-deception and confusion of the interpenetration of reality and fiction when they start to disavow and avow a certain type of identity and live in a specific plot structure that can soothe themselves from their traumas. Examining Katurian, the main storyteller in this play, Chapter Two of the thesis argues that as a storyteller/story-writer, Katurian falls into self-deception which buries himself into an imaginary space he creates and which consoles himself by transforming those agonizing recollections into the versions he can accept. Chapter Three tackles the other three story-listeners, Michal, Tupolski, and Ariel, to argue that in a way, storytelling leads to self-deceptive relief because it provides them with self-consoling explanations for their past to face with their present even though the three characters are trapped in their self-deception and self-evasion in the confrontation with their traumas. Thus, storytelling and self-deception deeply affect the four characters and serve as self-consolation for them. Although self-deception blocks their eyes to see reality, it comforts them to some degrees when they look back to their past.

As a whole, this work serves to illuminate the tragic as a fundamental human phenomenon and an objective fact that is distinct not only from comedy and irony but from other forms of calamity and modes of failure. I consider three distinct sources of philosophical knowledge on tragedy. The first is tragic drama and literature, the second is the theory of the tragic and the third source consists of the employment of the concept of tragedy to discuss events or characters that one encounters in life. I carefully draw upon the first two sources to thicken the elaborations of four different facets of the third. In this process, I extrapolate Szondi’s notion that tragedy is a specific dialectic in a specific space. In the course of this work, I place a greater emphasis upon this general concept of the tragic as opposed to a poetics of tragedy. The dissertation bears out, however, that it is ultimately poetics - and not the dialectic as general concept - that provide us with the richer insights into tragedy as it unravels in life. The specific dialectic of tragedy unravels so as to cause the irreplaceable loss of something of great value. This provides me with a structuring element that ties the four central chapters together. In terms of content, I emphasize also upon the tragic flaw as a set of character traits (manifested by an individual or some form of collective) which keep tragedy in place. The consideration of the figure of Willy Loman allows me to examine the tragedy of failure of expectations which is a distinct category of the tragic and yet it oscillates such that ties together the other themes. A central idea that emerges from an analysis of the overlapping themes is that prior to tragedy is the investment of the deepest inner resources into a process. This investment gives rise to identity and to expectations. As a tragedy unfolds, the source of the identity or of expectation becomes also the birth place or the generator of all threats to this identity and the collapse of long nurtured expectations.

An exploration of self-deception in proslavery arguments in the antebellum South. This work explores how proslavery theorists were able to support slavery despite overwhelming evidence that slavery was immoral. By using non-intentional self-deception, slavery supporters tested their hypothesis that slavery was good in a motivationally biased manner that aligned with their interests and desires.

As a whole, this work serves to illuminate the tragic as a fundamental human phenomenon and an objective fact that is distinct not only from comedy and irony but from other forms of calamity and modes of failure. I consider three distinct sources of philosophical knowledge on tragedy. The first is tragic drama and literature, the second is the theory of the tragic and the third source consists of the employment of the concept of tragedy to discuss events or characters that one encounters in life. I carefully draw upon the first two sources to thicken the elaborations of four different facets of the third. In this process, I extrapolate Szondi’s notion that tragedy is a specific dialectic in a specific space. In the course of this work, I place a greater emphasis upon this general concept of the tragic as opposed to a poetics of tragedy. The dissertation bears out, however, that it is ultimately poetics - and not the dialectic as general concept - that provide us with the richer insights into tragedy as it unravels in life. The specific dialectic of tragedy unravels so as to cause the irreplaceable loss of something of great value. This provides me with a structuring element that ties the four central chapters together. In terms of content, I emphasize also upon the tragic flaw as a set of character traits (manifested by an individual or some form of collective) which keep tragedy in place. The consideration of the figure of Willy Loman allows me to examine the tragedy of failure of expectations which is a distinct category of the tragic and yet it oscillates such that ties together the other themes. A central idea that emerges from an analysis of the overlapping themes is that prior to tragedy is the investment of the deepest inner resources into a process. This investment gives rise to identity and to expectations. As a tragedy unfolds, the source of the identity or of expectation becomes also the birth place or the generator of all threats to this identity and the collapse of long nurtured expectations.

In this dissertation I direct critique at a conception of self-deception prevalent in analytical philosophy, where self-deception is seen as a rational form of irrationality in which the self-deceiver strategically deceives himself on the basis of having judged that this is the best thing to do or, in order to achieve something advantageous. In Chapter One, I criticize the conception of self-deception as analogous to deceiving someone else, the so-called “standard approach to self-deception”. The account under investigation is Donald Davidson’s. I criticize Davidson’s outline of self-deception as involving contradictory beliefs, and his portrayal of self-deception as a rational and strategic action. I trace the assumptions involved in Davidson’s account back to his account of radical interpretation and argue that the problems and paradoxes that Davidson discusses are not inherent in self-deception as such but are problems arising in and out of his account. In Chapter Two, I present Sebastian Gardner’s account of self-deception. Gardner is concerned with distinguishing self-deception as a form of “ordinary” irrationality that shares the structure of normal, rational thinking and action in being manipulation of beliefs from forms of irrationality treated by psychoanalysis. I object to the way in which Gardner makes this distinction and further argue that Gardner is mistaken in finding support in Freud for his claim that self-deception involves preference. In Chapter Three, I present a different understanding of self-deception. I discuss self-deception in the context of Sigmund Freud’s writings on illusion, delusion, different kinds of knowledge, etc., and propose a view of self-deception where it is not seen as a lie to oneself but rather as motivated lack of self-knowledge and as a flight from anxiety. In Chapter Four, I discuss some problems inherent in the three accounts under investigation, for example, problems arising because first-person awareness is conflated with knowledge of objects.

In this thesis, Seneca&rsquo / s notion of self as self-love and the problem of self-deception are analyzed. In examining three types of self-love, &ndash / ignorant, progressing selves,&ndash / three models of self-deception are discussed. Self-deception is related to the problem of self-knowledge. I discuss the nature of self-love as self-esteem and self-preservation and self-shaping all of which are innate qualities and develop into more complex forms of knowing. Passions are concrete examples of the representations of deceived self / central to the overestimation of indifferents, the deceived self displays a pattern of reasoning that creates a paradox between what the self intends to do and what it actually appears or what the self wants to see himself as and what it actually is. In discussing various types of self-deception, it is argued that problem of deception can hardly be overcome practically even by education, although it is naturally possible. While the ignorant deceive themselves beyond their recognition, in the case of the educated selves, the tension between the knowledge of ignorance and the desire to be the person play an important role in self-deception. No one except the sage is free from self-deception. The thesis deals with the issue of self-knowing as a scarce possibility.

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed March 22, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-81).

It is a serious problem for some well-known accounts of moral motivation, that is, accounts of what ought to motivate us, that what is supposed to provide motivation to act well instead provides motivation to self-deceive. I term this the Self-Deception Problem. Any theorist who offers an account of moral motivation that has the Self-Deception Problem has reason for concern with our tendency to self-deceive. In this dissertation, I create a taxonomy of accounts of moral motivation, which provides a structural explanation for which accounts of moral motivation are liable to the Self-Deception Problem. Using this taxonomy, I am able explain why Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Joseph Butler are concerned with self-deception as a moral problem in a way that Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Francis Hutcheson are not. But the application of my taxonomy is not limited to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I also show how it fits the work of the contemporary psychologist Augusto Blasi and the contemporary philosopher Christine Korsgaard. Neither Blasi nor Korsgaard discusses self-deception in any thoroughgoing way but, as I argue, since both their accounts have the Self-Deception Problem, both of them have reason to do so. The most interesting theorist of moral motivation and self-deception, though, is Joseph Butler. Through a close reading of his arguments for the authority of conscience, I show how his account gives rise to the Self-Deception Problem, and how his sermons on self-deception serve as explanations of and responses to that problem. But the link is even tighter than that: on my novel interpretation of Butler's arguments in favor of the authority of conscience, what he is in fact arguing for is an appropriate degree of self-trust. His discussion of self-deception can accordingly be understood as seeking a proper degree of self-suspicion. On Butler's view, moral agency is not just a matter of recognizing our divinely set proper ends. Nor is it just a matter of acting as a self-legislating agent. It is primarily a matter of correctly modulating self-trust and self-suspicion.

Richard Holton has criticized the common idea that self-deception is deception by the self, and suggested it is rather deception about the self; self-deception must include necessarily erroneous beliefs about the self. In this article I claim that this condition is not necessary, based on two central traits of self-deception: its temporal character  and  its  bound  to  multiplication.  In  addition,  I  suggest  an  alternative condition in relation to the beliefs system implied in self-deception. / Richard  Holton  ha  cuestionado  la  idea  usual  de  que  el  autoengaño consiste en un engaño por el sí mismo, y ha propuesto en su lugar que la caracterización de este fenómeno debe incluir, como condición necesaria, la tesis de que  el  autoengaño  es  un  engaño acerca del  sí  mismo.  Se  defiende  aquí  la  afirmación de que tal requisito no es necesario, sobre la base de dos características centrales del autoengaño: su carácter temporal y su tendencia a la multiplicación. Asimismo, se esboza una condición alternativa respecto del conjunto de creencias involucrado en el autoengaño.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:19:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DavidLR_DISSERT.pdf: 671881 bytes, checksum: 59cb4354dc8863086fced6ff23421b07 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-10-15 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / This work aims to present a systematic study of sociology developed by Josu? de Castro. It is a theoretical work that aims to evidence the potentialities and limitations of the hunger analysis theoretical models of contemporary sociology. It was used concepts of Social Institution (Berguer and Bourdieu), Habitus-prec?rio and Ral? (Jess? Sousa) as weapons to comprehend better the hunger phenomenon on the sociology field, to consequently generate dialogs between Castros writings and the contemporary sociology. It demonstrates how hunger reproduces more by pre reflexive behavior patterns in a way that the moral rules become invisible and allow the phenomenon to continue in an invisible way / O trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar um estudo sistem?tico sobre a sociologia desenvolvida por Josu? de Castro. Trata-se de um trabalho de cunho eminentemente te?rico que tem como objetivo evidenciar as potencialidades e limita??es dos modelos te?ricos de an?lise da fome no ?mbito da sociologia contempor?nea. Utilizamo-nos dos conceitos de Institui??o Social (Berguer e Bourdieu), Habitus-prec?rio e Ral? (Jess? Sousa) como ferramentas para melhor compreender o fen?meno da fome no ?mbito da sociologia, gerando assim di?logos entre os escritos de Castro e a sociologia contempor?nea. Demonstramos como a fome reproduz-se mais por padr?es pr?-reflexivos de comportamento que invisibilizam os padr?es morais permitindo a manuten??o do fen?meno de forma invisibilizada