- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Part I Outside
- Outside
- The Weight of Reality
- Doubles
- Shadows
- Part II Chance
- Cause, Choice, Chance
- Part III Passions
- The Altiplano
- Return of the First Person Singular
- Aconcagua
- Seduction
- Truthfulness
- Part IV Belief
- The Stone Axe
- Angels with Guns
- Belief
- Performance
- Voyage
- Part V Justice
- The Future of Torture
- Justice
- The System
- Truth in Reconciliation
- Part VI Irrevocable
- The Babies in Trees
- Mortality
- Dignity
- Irrevocable Loss
- Part VII Gratitude
- Gratitude
- Appendix Philosophy’s Tasks
- Notes
- About the Photographs
- Acknowledgments
Return of the First Person Singular
Return of the First Person Singular
- Chapter:
- (p.53) Return of the First Person Singular
- Source:
- Irrevocable
- Author(s):
Alphonso Lingis
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
Phenomenology had taken consciousness in the first person to be the origin of meanings. For the postmodern philosophy of mind meanings are articulated in the taxonomic contrasts, semantic systems, grammatical forms, and rhetorical paradigms of languages, which are social and institutional productions. But anthropological field researchers find that the ideology or the mythical or religious elaborations of a community are very unevenly present in the understanding of any informant. To understand what an informant means the researcher has to envision how he or she acts in a practical and social field. Medical anthropologists find that a patient has to compose his own account of the impact of his illness on his family, his work, his sense of the life he henceforth has to lead and the death that he has to face. Anthropological researchers who study the private religions elaborated by psychotics have come to recognize their positive and productive function.
Keywords: postmodern philosophy of mind, the anthropologist and her informant, medical anthropology, medical discourse and patient's discourse, private religions
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
- Title Pages
- Frontispiece
- Part I Outside
- Outside
- The Weight of Reality
- Doubles
- Shadows
- Part II Chance
- Cause, Choice, Chance
- Part III Passions
- The Altiplano
- Return of the First Person Singular
- Aconcagua
- Seduction
- Truthfulness
- Part IV Belief
- The Stone Axe
- Angels with Guns
- Belief
- Performance
- Voyage
- Part V Justice
- The Future of Torture
- Justice
- The System
- Truth in Reconciliation
- Part VI Irrevocable
- The Babies in Trees
- Mortality
- Dignity
- Irrevocable Loss
- Part VII Gratitude
- Gratitude
- Appendix Philosophy’s Tasks
- Notes
- About the Photographs
- Acknowledgments