Losing Yourself: How to be a Person Without a Self
With
Jay L. Garfield
Jay L. Garfield investigates one of the most pervasive and pernicious of illusions: the sense that we are selves. How do we come to see ourselves as selfless without falling into a nihilistic view that we don't exist at all, that we have no agency, or no responsibility? The answer is to come to see ourselves as persons. Over four evenings, Jay explored what it is to be a person, but to lack a self, and the understanding of human life and morality that this enables.
Readings
Excerpts from "Losing Yourself: On Living without a Self"*
*From the forthcoming title, LOSING YOURSELF: On Living without a Self, by Jay Garfield, to be published by Princeton University Press, April 2022. This content may not be reproduced or disseminated without formal permission of the publisher.
Recorded Sessions
Monday, November 30
Monday, December 7
Monday, December 14
Monday, December 21
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Facilitating Teacher
Jay L. Garfield is the Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Buddhist Studies at Smith College. He chairs the Philosophy department and directs Smith’s logic and Buddhist studies programs as well as the Five College Tibetan Studies in India program. He is also visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, professor of philosophy at Melbourne University, and adjunct professor of philosophy at the Central University of Tibetan Studies. Garfield’s most recent books are Knowing Illusion: Bringing a Classical Tibetan Debate into Contemporary Discourse (with The Yakherds, forthcoming 2020), What Can’t be Said: Paradox and Contradiction in East Asian Philosophy (with Yasuo Deguchi, Graham Priest and Robert Sharf, forthcoming 2020), and The Essential Jewel of Holy Practice: Patrul Rinpoche’s Instructions for Practice (with Emily McRae, 2017).
