All in Existentialism
With his total privileging of the concept of Being, Heidegger radically changed the way we conceptualise selfhood. The self went from being an epistemic entity, as it had been for centuries under Descartes and Kant, to a largely ontological one. This paper attempts to shed light of aspects of this paradigmatic shift in the philosophy of the self.
For Kierkegaard, the self was a synthesis of the ‘finite’ and the ‘infinite’. The finite is the limiting factor, all that which we cannot change, and the infinite is the expanding factor, all that which could just as well be some other way.
Literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin once claimed that, in Dostoevsky's novels, characters are so fully developed, that they can be claimed to be independent even from their author, and his works are thus "polyphonic." But how true is this really? This paper explores this very question.
