This chapter introduces the main concerns and aims of this book with an opening case study on Phoenix’s Meleager exemplum in Iliad 9. It then surveys the recent developments of scholarship on allusive marking, especially in Latin poetry: it explores the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ and other tropes of allusion; challenges the assumption that such devices are distinctively bookish and scholarly; and introduces a new term for the phenomenon (‘indexicality’). The second half of the introduction outlines the author’s methodological approach to early Greek allusion, incorporating elements of both neoanalysis and traditional referentiality. The author focuses on ‘mythological intertextuality’ in archaic epic, exemplified through a close reading of the ‘Nestor’s cup’ inscription. This section considers the reconstruction of lost traditions, the question of Homeric allusion to Near Eastern poetry, and the gradual transition to ‘textual intertextuality’. No specific watershed can be pinpointed. The growing practice of citing other poets by name attests to increasingly greater engagement with specific texts, but the Iliad and Odyssey already provide a plausible example of direct intertextual allusion. The chapter closes by addressing three further issues of context that are central to this study: audiences and performance, poetic agonism, and authorial self-consciousness.

The work of David Foster Wallace can be seen to critically renew ideas and concerns from existentialist philosophy and literature. Wallace repeatedly expressed his admiration of existentialist authors, and his fiction contains many explicit and implicit references to their writings. This chapter will provide an overview of the main themes and intertextual connections that Wallace’s work shares with the existentialists, such as a comparison with Sartre’s view of consciousness, Kierkegaard’s critique of irony, and Camus’s relation of meaningful existence to community; also, a brief comparative reading of the opening of Infinite Jest and Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” of “The Depressed Person” and Beauvoir’s “The Monologue,” and of “B.I. #20” and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Overall, Wallace shares with these authors the conviction that philosophy and literature are partially overlapping activities, that some philosophical problems are best approached through literature, and that their works therefore blur the boundaries between these modes of writing.

Chapter 12 examines Hegel's characterization of human society as the "living good," which expresses his version of the analogy between societies and organisms. For him the analogy implies that societies both incorporate processes of life (in carrying out the activities necessary for material reproduction) and possess the same structure as biological life (that of a "self-positing" subject, which maintains itself by positing "contradictions" internal to itself and then negotiating them so as establish its own identity). Hegel also insists on the differences between life and social being: the presence in social life of self-consciousness and the capacity for freedom. Thus, societies are normatively and functionally constituted living beings that realize the good via specialized, coordinated functions, which, unlike the activities of organisms, are infused with ethical content deriving from their potential to be consciously self-determined. Analyzing Hegel's master–slave dialectic illustrates these ontological claims.

In Chapter 5, ‘Presence of the Other’, the implicit subject / object split reintroduced into the musical subject by the need for its own self-recognition finds a potential solution in the presence of an other in whom the self may see itself mirrored. Indeed, Schumann’s writing and music suggest a blurring of identities and fusion of self and other that resonates strongly with the Romantic mythology of hermaphroditic union, as seen in the 1841 song collection Liebesfrühling jointly written with Clara. Through this mirroring and recognition of self in other, Schumann’s music may in certain cases be claimed to achieve a state of self-conscious awareness, to ‘hear itself singing’. Yet, as pointed to at the chapter’s close, such doubling of self and other always runs the risk of narcissism – the idea that the beloved object is merely a self-image, a fabrication of the subject’s desire.

This chapter explores what Gadamer might mean by giving hermeneutics the task of “overcoming the primacy of self-consciousness” and asks whether it is really Hegel in his sights as he attempts to do so. The chapter first attends to the conflicting strands of deep solidarity with Hegel, coupled with just as deep a rejection. Gadamer’s final answer is that Hegel’s philosophy, whatever Hegel may have intended, did not completely break free of “subjectivism.” Of fundamental importance for Gadamer is the idea of finitude. Gadamer embraces what Hegel calls “the bad infinite” when he claims that the “soul’s dialogue with itself” has no teleological end point and is inexhaustible. Gadamer points to the limits of reflection.

Chapter 3, “The Form of Reflexivity and the Expression of Self-Presence”, explores the role of transcendental apperception for inner experience according to the Transcendental Deduction (B) of the first Critique. By showing the insufficiencies of two alternative views defended in the literature, namely the psychological view and the logical view, the chapter argues that transcendental apperception is the capacity for reflexive consciousness in general. Its characteristic form, the general form of reflexivity, is the most general condition on any conscious representation and can be expressed by the phrase “I think”. The chapter concludes by arguing that the phrase “I think”, if in fact attached to a representation in thought, expresses self-reference to oneself as individual thinker, yet without determining oneself.

This chapter starts with a discussion of the pervasiveness of adversity, the universality of healing practices, and the thesis that the impulse to heal and care is deeply rooted in human nature. It reviews the historical, anthropological, and contemporary literature on the concepts of “wounded healers” and “creative illnesses.” The chapter briefly describes the structure of the book, and the biographies included. This is followed by a discussion of potential negative effects of traumatic life experiences on therapists and the need for cognizance, as well as resilience and support in transforming vulnerability into empathy and strength. It is proposed that theories and practices of different schools of psychology evolved as ways for their founders and practitioners to solve challenges in their own lives and thus could best be understood and appreciated when seen in that context. This is one of the reasons we should pay attention to these founders’ life stories, providing us with nuances, helping us to avoid simplistic and rigid interpretation of abstract thoughts distilled from real-life experiences.

This chapter shows that in the German intellectual tradition, Kant, followed by Fichte and Hegel, saw the reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) in a completely different way than the French and British traditions. Specifically, in Germany recognition was seen as a condition not only for self-control, but also for individual self-determination. The chapter provides a detailed explanation of how this shift in orientation became possible, its connection with the “idealistic” presuppositions of German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, and the broader political claims of this new interpretation of “recognition”.

This chapter turns to Karl Marx’s treatment of Epicureanism and Lucretius in his doctoral dissertation, and argues that the questions raised by Marx may be brought to bear on our own understanding of Epicurean philosophy, particularly in respect of a tension between determinism and individual self-consciousness in a universe governed by material causation. Following the contours of Marx’s dissertation, the chapter focusses on three key topics: the difference between Democritus’ and Epicurus’ methods of philosophy; the swerve of the atom; and the so-called ‘meteors’, or heavenly bodies. Marx sought to develop Hegel’s understanding of Epicurus, in particular by elevating the principle of autonomous action to a first form of self-consciousness – a consideration largely mediated by Lucretius’ theorization of the atomic swerve and his poem’s overarching framework of liberating humans from the oppression of the gods.

A popular view holds that no wrong is done to an animal when it is killed painlessly. In arguing against this view in the previous chapter, I granted for the sake of argument that chickens are merely sentient. I framed the discussion this way to make clear that the case against anti-speciesist versions of humane slaughter does not depend on revisionary claims about the cognitive abilities of food animals. Contemporary science, however, suggests that the cognitive abilities of chickens are more extensive than is generally recognized, to the point that they possess a primitive form of self-consciousness. If chickens have mental abilities that place them in an intermediate status between merely sentient beings and persons, this will have bearing not only on the arguments I examined in the last chapter, but on any attempt to justify slaughtering them, including attempts that employ Singer’s or potentially other versions of protectionist theory. The revised understanding of chicken cognition thus poses a separate challenge to protectionist arguments for humane slaughter, independent of the challenge posed by the time-relative interest account. The version of primitive self-consciousness that I defend innovates on previous versions to include a primitive ability to conceive of oneself through time.