On the basis of the abstracts posted so far, I think a discussion of Bakhtin
might be quite interesting since his name has periodically surfaced, and in
many ways he is responsible for the notion of co-constitution of the self
through dialogue, a topic which has been commented on repeatedly on xmca.
So I'd vote for:
> Self and Other in Bakhtin1s Early Philosophical Essays:
>
> Prelude to a Theory of Prose Consciousness
>
> Deborah Hicks
>
> University of Cincinnati
>
> The self is not a thing, a substrate, but the protagonist of a life1s
> tale. The conception of selves who can be individuated prior to their
> moral ends is incoherent. We could not know if such a being was a human
> self, an angel, or the Holy Spirit. [Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self,
> p. 162] "We think we are tracing the nature of the thing, but we are
> only tracing the frame through which we view it." So writes Ludwig
> Wittgenstein in "Philosophical Investigations," about processes of
> social scientific inquiry. We interpretively read social events through
> various disciplinary lenses; this is no less true of our readings of
> theorists. My purpose in this reflective essay is to read the work of
> Mikhail Bakhtin through an interpretive lens that differs somewhat from
> the norm within contemporary sociocultural/historical theories of
> psychology and education. My essay hinges on the argument that, among
> sociocultural theorists, Bakhtin's work has tended to be aligned with
> frameworks that focus more on social systems of activity and discourse.
> Though Bakhtin's writings do address shared genres of discourse and
> social action, his work also addresses another aspect of living and
> learning. As they draw on mediated systems of social action and
> discourse, individuals construct histories that are ethically
> particular and attuned to moral ends. Dialogue, as depicted by Bakhtin,
> entails a form of answerability that is morally responsive to unique
> others and particular relationships. Considered outside of such moral
> ends, social actions and discourses lose a crucial part of their
> concreteness -- their embeddedness in relationships constituted by
> thoughts, feelings, and histories between unique individuals. The
> complex particulars of morally-imbued relationships have been oddly
> missing from theoretical discourses about learning in social context.
> Considered in their breadth, Bakhtin's writings offer a critical
> alternative: A theory of discourse, selfhood, and social action that
> draws heavily from moral philosophy and literature, and that places high
> theoretical value on ethical particularity. His early philosophical
> essays argue that discourse and action outside of morally imbued
> relationships might be true of angels and spirits, but not of persons
> engaged in historical moments of living.
>
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