Panpsychism and the Problems of Modernity - Part 2
Dualism is Unintelligible and Consciousness-ish Doesn’t Help – a Hegelian Critique
“As I am using the term, a distinction becomes a dualism when it is drawn in terms that make the relations between the distinguished items unintelligible.”
— Robert Brandom, A Sprit of Trust: Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirt, 660.
“Thinking things over . . . directs us to the universal in things, but the universal is itself one of the moments of the concept. The fact that there is rhyme and reason to the world conveys exactly what is contained in the expression ‘objective thought.’ To be sure, the latter expression is awkward because thought is habitually used for something belonging to the mind, i.e., to consciousness and what is objective is for the most part attributed to what is not mental.”
— G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §23.
Caveat: I originally wrote this piece before Philip Goff published Why?: The Purpose of the Universe. Having now read that profound text, I am unsure whether much of what I have to say critically about Goff’s position in this series still holds water. I plan to revisit these articles in the near future.
In the first episode of this series,[i] I painted a picture of panpsychism as a sophisticated emergence account of the mind-brain relation. The panpsychist claims (a) matter, at its most fundamental level, has consciousness-ish (rudimentary sentience and meaning) among its essential properties; and (b) sufficiently complex organizations of matter cause the emergence of bona-fide consciousness (full-blown sentience and meaning). Thus, one may argue that the emergence of bona-fide consciousness from the physical constituents of the universe is not a bit of conceptual sleight of hand or explanatory free lunch. The emergence of full-blown consciousness is perfectly intelligible in terms of the interaction between the essential consciousness-ish properties of matter and increasing levels of integrated information in natural organizations of matter. This process is philosophically coherent, and in principle it can be put to the empirical test by a “new science of consciousness.” Moreover, we get all that out of panpsychism, while nevertheless maintaining that the physical and the bona-fide mental are sui generous distinct, i.e. there’s no looming threat of fully conscious socks.
The thesis that quarks and electrons are conscious-ish is more than a little counterintuitive, and one would need a heavy set of reasons to indulge this suggestion. That is correct, but panpsychism gets plenty argumentative traction by alleviating the insufferable tension between two central commitments of modernity.[ii] On the one hand, the Galilean Revolution requires a dualist sorting according to which the physical and the mental are strictly cordoned off from each other, i.e., the physical and the mental are essentially different and, in some sense, autonomous. On the other hand, the Galilean Revolution presumes an overall intelligibility of the world, i.e., there is nothing absolutely mysterious in nature, and if we can eliminate a mystery scientifically, that’s all the better. The prima facie ill-fit between these commitments is obvious: sorting nature into essentially different and operationally autonomous ontological categories, while at the same time insisting on the ultimate intelligibility of their relationship, preferably understood in the terms of one side of the divide (the physical should run the show), do not play nicely together. All the other attempts to relieve this incongruity (interactive dualism, materialism, illusionism, simple versions of emergence, etc.) are wanting, whereas panpsychism is not plagued by any deal-breaking problems. Thus, we can safely make an inference to the best explanation supporting panpsychism (despite its own prima facie strangeness) based on the conjunction of the dualist sorting and the presumed intelligibility of things. In other words, as things stand, the only way to maintain the suppositions of modernity (dualism and intelligibility) is to defend panpsychism, and the only good reason to suffer the otherwise extravagant implications of panpsychism, is the weight of the modernist’s commitment to dualism and intelligibility. Thus, though it isn’t a truth of logic, the following captures the dialectical situation for the panpsychist:
(1) If Panpsychism, then (Dualism & Intelligibility).
That is, if you’re going to be a panpsychist, you very likely won’t give up either the dualist sorting or the presumption that the universe is intelligible; and if you are committed to the dualist sorting and the intelligibility of the universe (as understood by modernity), then you are probably going to need to settle for panpsychism. We are assuming that the primary (maybe only) reason to be a panpsychist is a desire to square the dualist sorting with the intelligibility of the world, and there are no other ways of consistently maintaining those fundamental theses of modernity available. In short, panpsychism and the modernist conjunction are a package deal (at least as the panpsychist sees it), and for our purposes it is important to note that giving up the one in all likelihood means giving up the other.
There is one more point that I failed to emphasize sufficiently in the first installment of this series that we need to have in mind going forward. That is, the panpsychist must claim that the consciousness-ish of fundamental physical particles is an essential property of those entities, just as their physical properties (charge, spin, etc.) are essential. It is as silly to ask, for example, why the electron is negatively charged as it is to ask why a bear is a mammal. That attribute is partly what the entity is, and if it didn’t have that attribute it simply wouldn’t exist. Being negatively charged is constitutive of what it is to be an electron, as being a mammal is constitutive of what it is to be a bear. That, however, is not to say that it doesn’t make sense to ask how we know electrons are negatively charged or bears are mammals; nor am I claiming that there is no account to be given as to how electrons or bears came on the scene in the first place. The point is that the essential properties of things form the ground floor of their intelligibility, and you don’t have to explain why the thing has those attributes. Leaving aside the questions of how we know something is a dog or how dogs evolved in the first place, the question “Why is Fido a dog?” earns no more interesting answer than “Because that is what he is!” As Wittgenstein says, explanations come to a stop somewhere and the spade eventually turns. It doesn’t make sense to as ask why a quark has spin among its attributes, even though it does make sense to ask why a certain quark is spinning in a certain way at a certain moment and why there are any quarks at all.
Suppose the panpsychist were to claim that the consciousness-ish of fundamental physical particles were accidental instead of essential. Then it would make sense to ask why those particles are conscious-ish. We would then be owed an account as to why this accident occurs. Thus, panpsychism (at least in its current form), would only be kicking the can down the road and the question of satisfying the commitment to ultimate intelligibility would be left painfully open. Ultimate intelligibility requires that at bottom we hit something consious-ish “no questions asked.” Thus, for the panpsychist, the explanatory spade for consciousness must satisfactorily turn when it strikes the consciousness-ish that is supposedly constitutive of the what-it-is-to-be of the fundamental particles. Another way of putting the point, which I will adopt in the following, is that just as being an electron is internally related to being negatively charged (negative charge is part of what an electron is, not how it relates to something else), so too the panpsychist must claim that being an electron is internally related to being conscious-ish. In short, for the panpsychist, being negatively charged and being conscious-ish are both constitutive of being an electron.
There have been few philosophers quite as committed to the intelligibility of the world as Hegel. Indeed, his motto for both hist politics and metaphysics is “What is actual is rational, and what is rational is actual.”[iii] His commitment runs so deep that Hegel is also one of the history of philosophy’s most trenchant enemies of dualism.[iv] For Hegel, the intelligibility of any relation presupposes two conditions: the terms must contrast, and yet that contrast must ultimately be synthesized. In other words, we make sense of things by first drawing contrasts, but, since free standing negativity (things just being different) doesn’t shed light on anything (intelligibility is what things are, not merely what they are not), these contrasts must be resolved into a unity at a more comprehensive level of intelligibility. Thus, Hegel argues all apparent dualisms are resolved at a more comprehensive level of intelligibility.[v]
One of Hegel’s more oft-cited examples serves to make this point well.[vi] Suppose someone points and says “Here!” What can she mean? Well, “here” at least means “not there” or “not anywhere else.” Likewise, “there” or “anywhere else” must mean “not here.” That is, “here” and “there” are inter-defined negatively – they are what they are only in contrast to something they are not, which is each other. Immediately, by saying “x is here” I’m telling you what x isn’t (“x is not there”), and the same goes for “x is there” (“x is not here”). For Hegel, the immediate analysis of any concept quickly dissolves into a negative opposition with another notion. Thus, there is no having one concept, since every concept entails its negative complement. If here were not intrinsically opposed to there, there would be no difference between them, and there would thereby be no here to point to in the first place. For Hegel, this oppositional coupling is true for all concepts, and this is the origin of his famous argument that self-conscious can only arise in opposition to something other than itself.[vii] Sadly, if that’s where the conceptual story ends, it’s a woeful tale. If what I mean by “there” is exhaustively “not here” and what I mean by “here” is exhaustively “not there,” then I’m stuck in a circle of negativity that’s going nowhere. Where all we have is negative inter-definability, there is no substantive content to our assertions, i.e., we are claiming nothing by applying such predicates.
Surely, I claim something when I say “x is here” or “x is there,” so there must be something more going on behind the scenes, and this is where Hegel’s all important introduction of the notion of determinate negation saves the day. In any intelligible opposition, each term “is itself a determinate nothingness, one which has content.”[viii] That’s Hegel-speak to say that there is not a pure, empty nothing, but has a determinate character, i.e., being there is more than just not being here. There is more to there than what it is not. That determinate difference likewise entails that here has a determinate character too. Thus, when we say “Here is not there,” we are not opposing here to an empty nothing, but to something with which it determinately differs. By “determinately differs” we mean that the terms contrast in a way that tells us something about what they are in addition to what they are not, i.e., a negation that nevertheless affirmatively characterizes the contrasted terms implicitly. For example, if I say “JFK’s assassin is not in the room,” I haven’t really told you anything about the two terms beyond the fact that in this case they don’t coincide.[ix] That is not so with respect to the opposition between here and there. There is a content to being there more than just not being here, and that content is implicit in their contrast. I cannot recognize the negation of either of these terms without implicitly recognizing its affirmative content too. In other words, any negation that makes sense entails something else to which the negated term is compared. Determinate differing between two terms entails a determinate identity for each of the terms. Literally, the negating terms cannot be nothing, but must be something.[x]
For Hegel, the relation between here and there is not only determinacy conferring, i.e., it tells us what the two terms are, but it is also intelligibility conferring, i.e., it explains the relationship between the terms. Thus, understanding here and there presupposes, despite their surface opposition, a unity that grounds a common explanation; here and there are not only inter-definable, but also mutually intelligible. If here and there are mutually intelligible, then there must be some third thing, a mediation as Hegel calls it, grounding them both, otherwise their coupling would be a brute plurality. The notions of here and there can get off the ground, only if they are both internally related to the high-level concept of place. The particularities of here and there are intelligible only against the backdrop of place, their common universal. Notice, importantly, the opposition at the lower-level gets smoothed out at the higher-level, i.e., here and there are essentially the same things, they are places. Thus, once you understand the concept of place, the relation between here and there is perfectly intelligible (the plurality is synthesized into a unity), but that’s only because they are internally related to place. If you really grasp here and there, you will see that they are ultimately manifestations of place. The contrast is not an illusion in the sense that one is in error to mark a difference between here and there, but a more comprehensive understanding reveals that they are really various ways one and the same thing shows up in the concrete world. Hegel’s term of art for this smoothing out of lower-level contrasts within higher-level concepts is sublation (Aufheben): “By ‘aufheben’ we understand on the one hand something like clear out of the way or negating . . . . On the other hand, however, aufheben also means something like preserving . . . .”[xi] Hegel is not saying that something can be both here and there (in the same sense) all at once. Rather, the sublation of here and there entails that there is something else that they both are, place, because their opposition only makes sense in the context of their higher-order unity.
The basic logical point, i.e., contrasting species entail a common genus, is well-trod ground since Plato’s Phaedo. Hegel makes it his own by emphasizing that the higher-order of intelligibility wherein negativity gets smoothed over must be concrete as opposed to merely abstract. Hegel’s world consists of existing things, not abstract logical relata, so the relations between the opposed terms and the unity that sublates them must play out in the concrete.[xii] As he puts it in his own notoriously obscure words:
[A] “If it is said of the ground “it is unity of identity and difference’, then by this unity is not to be understood the abstract identity, since we would merely have once again the identity of understanding itself that has been recognized to be untrue. For this reason, in order to avoid that misunderstanding, one can also say that the ground is not merely the unity, but just as much the difference of the identity and the difference.”[xiii]
[B] “The expression ‘existence’. . . points to having-gone-forth and the concrete existence is the being that has gone forth from the ground, the being re-established through the sublation of the mediation. The essence, as sublated being, has demonstrated itself to us first as shinning in itself and the determinations of this shinning are the identity, the difference and the ground.”[xiv]
I realize that’s a mouthful, but it’s not so bad in light of the foregoing, In [A] Hegel is claiming that the unity between two concrete things, say, this here and that there, cannot be a mere abstraction or description, but a concrete existing thing too. Otherwise, the identity of these things would be only in the “understanding,” i.e., it would be just how we describe things and not what they really are themselves. Rather, the common element must really be the things it unifies, and therefore the universal is concrete and existing. Hegel refuses to help himself to abstract logical notions without paying an ontological expense, and he thinks that abstracta don’t do any work! Thus, in [B] we are being told that the common sublating “mediation” (place in our going example) must exist just as do its outer manifestations (here and there). If place is to unify the contrast between this here and that there intelligibly, then place too must be a this or a that. That is, the universal place must be a concrete entity no less than any particular here or there. Otherwise, Hegel worries that we are only adding descriptive fluff, and not getting at the real being of things. Thus, the synthetizing category must be a concrete universal, i.e. a substance identical among the concrete entities it unifies, underlying all its concrete manifestations.[xv] For Hegel this here and that there will ultimately come to be the same thing, place, as place is the concrete identity of the concrete heres and theres. [xvi] In short, Hegel is deadly serious about intelligibility, and he believes that it comes at a very high ontological price. Wherever there is an intelligible opposition, the opposed terms must ultimately be in an identity relation with a more comprehensive concrete entity.[xvii]
Hegel takes this line of argumentation, which is essentially the main thrust of his thinking, ALL THE WAY, such that everything gets sublated into an all-encompassing concrete universal, the famous (or infamous!) Absolute. He gets on that train, because he believes that ultimate intelligibility must sublate contingency; the way things are is the way they had to go or should have gone, so everything is contained in ultimate intelligibility concretely instantiated in the real world. Help yourself to disagree with that[xviii], but for our purposes there is a salvageable insight in Hegel’s analysis: where there are negatively inter-defined entities, on pain of losing intelligibility, there must be some concrete thing that grounds them both in an internal relation. Things known in contrast are unintelligible, unless they can be related to something that unifies them, but they cannot be related to that unifying principle merely by some contingent association. There can be no unresolved, brute dualism between two terms that make sense (both in themselves and in their relation). Moreover, that unifying principle isn’t just a conceptual redescription, but a concrete entity that grounds the supposedly opposed terms. Though I accept this thesis, what I’ll refer to simply as Sublation below, it is not necessary to prove it for my argument, though we will see that the panpsychist may need to invoke this thesis to her detriment.
Here, finally, is my case against panpsychism:
(1) Panpsychism, if and only if, (Dualism & Intelligibility).
(2) If Panpsychism, then (Bundle or Sublation).
(3) If Bundle, then ~(Panpsychism)
(4) If Sublation, then ~(Panpsychism)
Therefore:
(5) ~(Panpsychism).
Therefore:
(6) ~(Dualism & Intelligibility).
I already made the case for (1) above, so I’ll start with (2). The panpsychist, by definition, claims that, say, electrons have both essential physical properties (charge) and essential non-physical properties (consciousness-ish). Morevoer, by the standard story, the kind of thing that is charged is precisely not the kind of thing that is conscious-ish. This is dualism. Now, what kind of account of electrons will the panpsychist give: a bundle theory or a substance theory? On the former, the electron is just a collection of ungrounded properties not had by anything else but the bundle. For a bundle theorist, properties are “free floating,” as it were. On the latter, the panpsychist is claiming that the physical properties and consciousness-ish are both internally related to some underlying substance. According to the substance theory, properties don’t float freely but must be the properties of something. In this case, the panpsychist will be committed to a Hegelian sublation story. Nothing can have contrary essential properties constitutive of its being. Thus, somehow within the inner being of the electron the physical properties and the non-physical properties come to the same thing (what looks like a contrast between essentialities, is at bottom a kind of identity) in this more fundamental concrete entity. Thus, the panpsychist has to go with either a bundle theory regarding the relation between the physical properties and consciousness-ish of the electron or go in for their Hegelian synthesis.
How about (3)? A bundle theory of electrons is unavailable to the panpsychist, and I say that not merely due to my general revulsion for bundle theories.[xix] If bundling the physical and the mental is an option at the basic level of subatomic particles, such that we can simply say “In the electron spin and consciousness-ish are no more deeply related than the brute fact of their association,” then that same move could be made at the higher level, such that we simply say “The brain and bona fide consciousness are no more deeply related than the brute fact of their association.” If the bundle theory is an option, then why bother with all the drama and counterintuitive spookiness of panpsychism? Hume’s solution was available all along: there just are certain associations of attributes (more or less the same bundles show up regularly), and there’s nothing more to be said. Rather, one takes up the challenge of the mind-body problem in the first place, because he probably (at least implicitly) sees the bundle theory as a strike against the commitment to intelligibility. If attributes show up infallibly bundled together, that is because they are the essential properties of something underlying the standardly packaged bundles, and the underlying thing is the ground of making sense of the bundling. In short, the bundle theory at least strongly suggests against Intelligibility, and therefore (1) strongly suggests against coupling panpsychism and the bundle theory.
What can be said for (4)? As I argued above, if the panpsychist is going to reject the bundle theory and keep intelligibility, then her only option is Sublation, i.e., physical properties and consciousness-ish come to the same thing in the inner being of the electron. Once again, there’s a “Why bother?” objection here. If the mental and the physical can be sublated in Hegelian fashion at the subatomic level, then why can’t the synthesis occur between the brain and bona fide consciousness? We could spare ourselves the trouble of the emergence account, and just admit that the physical-mental partition is only a moment of analysis that gets overcome when we really understand these terms.[xx] Applying sublation at the the mind-brain level undoes any significant partitioning between the nature and the mind, and maintaining that partition is part of the point of the project. Thus, the panpsychist pushes the unresolved dualism down to the subatomic level. Nevertheless, an unresolved dualism is otiose to intelligibility wherever it rears its ugly head, whether in the quarks or at the level of galaxies. Thus, in lieu of a bundle theory story, the panpsychist has to go for sublation, but that is simply to deny the dualism that set us on this trip in the first place In other words, opening up to sublation calls dualism into question, and that, once again by (1), strongly suggests against coupling panpsychism with sublation.
The inference to (5) should be obvious. Either Bundle or Sublation has to be the case for panpsychism, but they both effectively undermine panpsychism. Thus, panpsychism fails by its own standards. Furthermore, the inference to (6) is easy, though it’s not strictly needed for the argument against panpsychism: if you lose panpsychism, then either Dualism or Intelligibility has go too (they are not both true). This conclusion poses a deep dilemma for the modernist, as one of his most basic principles, on which much more than just seminar room metaphysics rides, has to be jettisoned. Hegel thinks dualism is the culprit that must be exiled.[xxi]
I agree with Hegel on this point (though with some caveats), but I will save that long story for another series. In the third and final installment of this series, I will look critically at panpsychism in terms of Goff’s suggestion that it addresses modern disenchantment and nihilism.
Consider supporting this newsletter by purchasing one course Heidegger on Technology
[i] Here is a discussion of that piece on Philosophy for the People.
[ii] The same is the case for any of myriad of counterintuitive and just-so stories told in modern philosophy of mind, and not just panpsychism.
[iii] Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans,. T.M. Knox (Oxford, 1952), 10. See also The Encyclopedia Logic, §6 (p. 33).
[iv] Don’t make the easy mistake of thereby concluding that Hegel was some sort of materialist. As Dreyfus and Taylor argue well in Retrieving Realism, materialism is no less a captive of the dualist sorting than its competitors. One of Hegel’s most important criticism of materialism can be found in The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Mill (Oxford, 1977), §346. Hegel’s non-materialism/non-dualism is a major theme in my forthcoming book, Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Techno-Nihilism.
[v] For a book-length and highly accessible introduction to these issue in Hegel, see Justus Hartnack’s An Introduction to Hegel’s Logic (Hackett, 1988).
[vi] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §90-108 (pp. 58-64).
[vii] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §174-177 (pp. 109-111).
[viii] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §79 (p. 51).
[ix] This example is less that satisfactory, since at some level of analysis “JFK’s assassin” and “this room” will have sufficient determinacy in their negation to render their contrast significant. The point I make in this paragraph is, nevertheless, correct, since such a sentence could be vacuously true, as would be the case if “JFK’s assassin” were a logical contradiction. Then the contrast would be an indeterminate negation, shedding no light on the intrinsic character of the terms. We don’t learn anything about what it is to be in a room by finding that five-sided squares never do so. “JFK’s assassin is not in the room,” however, is not a vacuous triviality that offers no synthetic significance. Hegel’s overall point is that any negation that gets a grip on the real world must implicitly entail an affirmative note for its terms, e.g., if I am going to contrast being JFK’s assassin and being in the room, then I must have access to more than just that they are not each other, but also what they are. Only nothing is just nothing. The point is more readily seen in analyzing terms, such as here and there, that are typically inter-defined negatively. There is the issue of something being “neither here nor there,” but the analysis of place to follow will assuage this worry, i.e., Hegel would argue that there must be a determinate affirmation implicitly in the contrast between place and non-place.
[x] Returning to Hegel’s dialectical account of self-consciousness, my awareness of myself as someone entails a relation of determinate negation with someone else. Hegel argues that you cannot understand yourself as a worthwhile human subject in contrast to a worthless, sub-personal being, but instead you must see the other as possessing a determinate, personal identity of his or her own. We might find ourselves in opposition, but maturity requires mutual recognition of our human dignity
[xi] G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part 1: Science of Logic, trans. K. Brinkman and D. Dahlstrom (Cambridge, 20110), §96 (p.153).
[xii] This is why we need to be careful characterizing Hegel as an idealist. He is decidedly opposed to anything like Berkely’s idealism, and he worries that Kant’s attempts to overcome Berkely fall short. Subjective idealisms are “one-sided” in that that they hinge on a subjectivity to which there is not objective other. Based on what we have discussed in the foregoing, it should be clear that Hegel will not broker the intelligibility of an unopposed subjectivity. Rather, Hegel is an idealist in a sense that we might also say Aristotle was an idealist: he believes that the world as it actually shows up is ultimately intelligible, i.e., the ideal (concept) is instantiated in the material universe. As he puts it, “When it is said that thought as an objective thought constitutes the core of the world, it may seem as if, by this, consciousness is supposed to be attributed to things . . .,” however “This meaning of thinking and its determinations is expressed more directly by the ancients when they say that [Nous] governs the world – or when we say reason exists in the world and mean by it that reason is the soul of the world, residing in it, immanent in it as its ownmost, innermost nature, its universal” (Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §24, Addition I (p.58)). These remarks should also put to rest the notion that Hegel is a panpsychist, as is often suggested. Panpsychism just pushes the unresolved dualism down to the subatomic level, but that leaves the universe no less unintelligible.
[xiii] Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §121, Addition (p.187).
[xiv] Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §123, Addition (p. 191)
[xv] Returning to the parallel analysis of self-consciousness, Hegel argues that bona fide self-recognition entails be mutual recognition with another self-consciousness, but that further requires that there must be a concrete universal of humanity, i.e., an existing human community with which we are all internally related.
[xvi] Notice that Hegel is here operating under Aristotle’s demand that substance be both a “what it is” (universal) and a “this such” (concrete).
[xvii] For Hegel, by moving from the immediate particularities of (here and there) to the concrete universal (place), we are not “moving down” the chain of being to less universal and therefore less intelligible stuff (as do materialists who undermine objects into basic material stuff), but up the chain into entities that are more ontologically and intelligibly comprehensive (and those terms come to the same thing for Hegel, of course!).
[xviii] But before doing so too quickly, realize that Hegel would argue that he is only making good on Socrates’s demand that the world be explained in terms of Nous in the Phaedo. Hegel differs from classical “idealists” to the extent that he believes that Nous must be concretely constitutive of the world in order to provide this explanation.
[xix] For compelling reasons against bundle theory in general, see Graham Harman The Quadruple Object (Zero, 2011) and Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Pelican, 2016).
[xx] If there is an argument to the effect that sublation is less plausible at the brain-bona fide consciousness level than at the subatomic level, then the panpsychist would have a reply to this objection. As far as I know, however, such an argument is yet outstanding.
[xxi] Brandom interestingly characterizes Hegel as the first postmodern thinker, since he was uniquely positioned to look at the presuppositions of the Enlightenment critically, and he is not afraid to jettison or at least alter what he believes goes astray. See Brandom’s A Spirit of Truth: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 2019), 30-32, and Heroism and Magnanimity: The Post-Modern form of Self-Conscious Agency (Marquette, 2019).