This chapter introduces the main topic of this book, inducing intimacy, and explains that the focus is deceptively induced sex and intimate relationships (i.e., sex and sexual and/or romantic relationships). It then sets out the book’s core aims, that is, to examine how the law has responded to inducing intimacy as a form of wrongdoing and source of harms and what can this tell us about the justifiability and desirability of using law to respond to these practices in the present age. The chapter also outlines the scope of the book and the sources used before introducing the theoretical framework that informs the analysis in the remaining chapters, which is based on the cultural significance of sex and marriage, including their significance for self-construction. The chapter closes by outlining the main arguments of the book, including the potential for its historical analysis to inform contemporary debates about whether and how to respond to inducing intimacy via law today.

When Lady Philosophy suggests that Boethius’ definition of himself as a rational mortal animal is inadequate, it implies that a superior self-understanding is contained within the Consolation. This chapter argues that this more adequate self-understanding – that Boethius, via participation in God, is himself divine – is implicit in the text and unpacks the profound implications and consolations of this interpretation of the self. Being a rational animal is more than being this specific living thing; it is also an opportunity to manifest divine intelligibility and goodness in the world. The chapter focuses on two perplexing arguments in Book IV that are unsatisfying without this interpretation of Boethius’ identity: that the punished are happier than those who escape punishment and that it is possible to attach ourselves to Providence and escape from Fate. The difficulties that most people will face in accepting these arguments are the direct result of the challenge of adopting this self-interpretation.

The Consolation presents two especially puzzling features that make its exegesis particularly challenging. Literarily, it adopts an uncommon style for a philosophical text, the prosimetrum, which combines prose with poetry. Content-wise, it develops a cogent philosophical message that, perplexingly, is conveyed in a labyrinthine way. These exegetical difficulties disappear if we interpret the Consolation as a form of self-examination grounded in Neoplatonic philosophy. The meandering way in which the text expresses its message illustrates Boethius’ inner conflict brought about by his sudden political fall. The root cause of his conflict is an unresolved tension within the Neoplatonic account of the human soul: the difficulty of reconciling our material self with our divine self. The Consolation’s highly unusual combination of prose and poetry is steeped in some of the basic principles of Neoplatonic pedagogy.

This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

Plato consistently holds that “no one does wrong willingly.” If this is the case, how is it possible for someone to be held morally responsible for his actions? Plato does seem not only to countenance the idea of moral responsibility but to make it a central notion in his political and eschatological writings (Section 5.1). The connection between personhood and embodiment is explored and the relevance of embodiment to moral responsibility is considered in Republic and Timaeus. The possibility of incontinence or akrasia reveals the divided selfhood in the emboodied person. The concept of culpable ignorance is introduced in order to account for moral responsibility. Culpable ignorance depends on the self-relexivity of rationality (Section 5.2).

Diaries are rich but sometimes challenging sources for historians, not least because of their particularity, which can make it difficult to generalize from them. This chapter outlines some of the ways scholars have approached diaries, highlighting the comparative method used by historians such as James Hinton. The relationship between, in Fothergill’s words, ‘the first-person narrator who speaks in the diary and the historical personage who held the pen’ is considered and Huff’s view that we should read diaries as ‘friendly explorers’ endorsed. Questions relating to when, why and for whom a diary may have been written are discussed and the equally important issue of what a diary omits or suppresses. The exceptional potential of long-run, unpublished diaries as source material (as used here) is underlined. Finally this chapter explains the principles on which the diaries on which the book is based were selected and the extent to which they may or may not be representative.

The Introduction interrogates the current critical view of early modern sympathy as a physical or occult process. It proposes that literary critics and historians have neglected the coexistence of the emotional and physical senses of the word sympathy in the early modern period. Exploring a broader range of intellectual frameworks – including religious culture, literary theories of imitation, and humanist pedagogy – complicates the idea that sympathy was primarily an automatic or a humoral phenomenon. The Introduction also argues that translations of European vernacular texts, including Du Bartas’s The Historie of Judith (1584) and Montaigne’s Essais (1603), played a significant role in introducing the affective meaning of sympathy to English readers. This expanding emotional vocabulary – along with other material and social changes in the period – led to an increased theorization of pity and compassion, whereby individuals came to be regarded as a connected network of distinct selves rather than a homogenous social group. In this way, the emergence of sympathy as a term and concept prompted a reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of early modern selfhood.

Pragmatist readings of Kierkegaard, like fideistic readings, treat the conceptual apparatus of faith as all neatly in place: All that’s missing is an act of will (i.e., something other than understanding) to execute the program. But what we actually find in Kierkegaard are new conceptual distinctions. The chapter argues that in The Sickness unto Death, the question of what it means to be a self is answered through a process of abstraction.  Rather than the text motivating us to do more, feel more, or commit more decisively (as we might expect from Kierkegaard), what we "experience" in The Sickness unto Death is an enumeration of conceptual distinctions that enable us to notice more, question more, and reason better – that is, to engage in the kinds of activities normally associated with traditional philosophy. It is argued that the minimal (i.e., “naked”) self described in this text is not something one can experience concretely but rather exists only for abstract reflection.

The Sickness unto Death presents a startlingly modern view of the self as non-substantialist, emergent, and process-driven. Instead of an immaterial soul or metaphysical essence, Kierkegaard’s self is a state of the human body and mind in “synthesis,” something human beings can become (or fail to become) through relating to themselves in a particular way. But the self is also presented in this work as an essentially eschatological being. While the self may be formed in and through its social context, Anti-Climacus returns again and again to the idea that the self is at heart the subject of an eternal judgment. This has significant implications both for what Kierkegaard takes selves – and by extension each of us – to be, and how we understand the temporality within which beings like us live.

Compares Cassirer and Heidegger's take on the human being's capacity to orient itself in the world in a meaningful way. Cassirer's theory of the functions of consciousness, the only meat to his functional conception of human subjectivity, is used to describe the diverse, cultural compasses by means of which the 'symbolic animal' navigates the human world (7.1). Heidegger's accounts of 'the they' and of owned ('authentic') existence in turn provide a theory of Dasein's capacity to orient itself within and towards its world (7.2). In view of their shared interest in orientation, I discern an important distinction for both Cassirer and Heidegger between an orienting and an oriented self. With regard to both, they ultimately disagree about the infinite (cultural) or finite (temporal) nature of the human being (7.3).

This chapter reviews what is known about the interpersonal style of people with antisocial personality and psychopathy, concluding that antisocial individuals have a cold, vindictive and hostile interpersonal style and that they lack the motivation to engage in an empathic way with others. The triarchic view of human selfhood– the self as social actor, as motivated agent and as autobiographical author – is introduced as a framework within which the antisocial individual might be understood from a first-person perspective. So-called dark traits are considered, particularly their role in sexual offending and sexual sadism. It is suggested the ‘dark traits’ construct might be expanded to include paranoia, moral disengagement, spitefulness and greed. The concept of ‘emotion goals’ is introduced and considered in relation to a quadripartite typology of violence that sees violence as reflecting appetitive versus aversive motivation interacting with an impulsive versus controlled dimension.

‘Transport’ was an increasingly complex word in the nineteenth century, linking developments in transport technology to an older sense of being carried away by powerful emotions. This chapter shows how inventively Victorian narrative styles responded to new and established forms of transport, including stagecoach, train and boat, and how much was at stake in those imaginative engagements. Style was a way of responding not only to the rhythms and mechanics of travel but to its many associations, questions about progress and control, challenges to genre and to selfhood, even a rekindling of primal impulses.

Context, plot, character and theme have dominated modern critical understandings of Wilkie Collins’s fiction, and there are relatively few discussions of his idiom, tone or voice. Collins himself seems to have encouraged this approach to his work, and repeatedly downgraded the question of literary style. But the topic takes us to the heart of his work, and helps us both to understand the nature and quality of his achievement and to see the relationship within it between questions of language and signification and those of identity and the sense of self.  Collins is fascinated in many of his fictions by what it means to have a troubled, false or non-existent identity, to have bodies and sensations that are not properly one’s own; the most revelatory texts and inscriptions in his work are often anonymous or unstylised. This chapter is about how Collins’s work explores and exposes the vulnerability of style, as it stages style’s appearances and disappearances.

This chapter seeks to locate and elucidate the philosophical precedents and mechanisms in late-antique and Byzantine Christian thought that inform the tension between the rigorous affirmation of autonomous moral determination, on the one hand, and the self-effacing quality of ecclesiastical and monastic life, on the other. Though expressed with some variance and terminological inconsistency, the majority of Christian writers affirm some version of 'free will' and universally attribute the capacity for moral development to all humankind, developing and altering paradigms from the mélange of philosophical concepts present in Middle- and Neoplatonism. No less prominent, however, is the assertion—both tacitly and explicitly—that private moral judgment and individual conscience are unreliable. Each human being not only requires a pedagogical process for proper moral development but also depends upon the presence and guidance of a heteronomous 'other', whether human or divine. This chapter will accordingly seek to demonstrate that, while Christians of late antiquity and Byzantium considered free will and moral determination to be an inextricable aspect of moral psychology, they did not have the same understanding of autonomy that emerged so forcefully during the Enlightenment and in its wake.

This chapter begins by arguing that the common tendency to write off Rorty’s views on morality on the grounds that they are vulnerable to straightforward charges of relativism is mistaken if only because it ignores the fact that those views are conceived independently of his epistemological behaviorism. It then moves on to examine the relationship between Rorty’s notion of selfhood and his distinction between public and private morality. In exploring that relationship, a number of problematic issues are identified concerning: Rorty’s dependence on a Freudian multi-personality account of the self, his excessive optimism regarding the demands of self-creation in modern societies, and whether the very idea of morality as a private concern can carry the weight he places upon it. Some of the literary critic Lionel Trilling’s views on the burdens of self-making are introduced to temper Rorty’s utopian expectations.