This is from an archived blog post (roughly three years goal) that I thought to post—lightly edited—afresh because I continue to find otherwise very bright people writing on psychoanalytic theory and therapy, from both philosophical and psychological vantage points, which appear not to have read Ilham Dilman, or at least his titles never appear in the citations and bibliographies. This is rather disconcerting, for his luminous works could save these selfsame individuals from claiming or repeating a lot of nonsense, or simply stuff that is neither well-reasoned nor true. Dilman wrote clearly and his material was well-argued, albeit in a modest if not deceptive way, thus it was nowhere near as pompous, assertive, or ostentatious as arguments among professional philosophers often are or can be (particularly when arguing with each other).
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Occasionally one comes across a philosopher who, one believes quite strongly, was unduly neglected when alive, and thus virtually forgotten or ignored after his or her death (of course some philosophers receive posthumous attention or fame). Ilham Dilman (November 4, 1930 – January 17, 2003) perfectly illustrates such a case. I was surprised to discover some years ago from my former teacher and dear friend, Nandini Iyer, that Dilman, a philosopher par excellence, taught for a brief period at UC Santa Barbara. I doubt they made an offer to keep him, given the philosophical or ideological orientation of the department in those days, although I imagine he might have gotten along well with Herbert Fingarette (for whom I was a Teaching Assistant in his introductory course to Asian philosophies). It turns out my speculative inference was mistaken, I am happy to correct the record: as Dilman himself notes in the posthumously published collection of essays, Philosophy as Criticism (Continuum, 2011), after one year at UC Santa Barbara, he “was offered an Assistant Professorship.”
Among the titles by Dilman in my “library,” three of them I bought “used” after being drawn to their cover art while browsing in The Book Den in downtown Santa Barbara many years ago, thereby providing proof of a sort that, at least sometimes, and albeit inadvertently and in part retrospectively, one can judge a book by its cover.
I invite you to consider four books in particular by Dilman that treat various dimensions of Freudian philosophy of mind, psychoanalysis (sometimes in comparison to what is termed ‘academic,’ ‘scientific,’ ‘empirical,’ or ‘experimental’ psychology, that is, that sort of psychology that dominates the academic discipline in the U.S.), and therapy in a manner that is at once incisive, elegant, and accessible if not simply brilliant (one of those adjectives of assessment and praise that, alas, are all-too-frequently employed for hyperbolic rhetorical effect, thereby diminishing its intentional semantic effect and power):
- Freud and Human Nature (Basil Blackwell, 1983).
- Freud and the Mind (Basil Blackwell, 1984).
- Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988)
- Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000).
Other works by Dilman (not an exhaustive list):
- Morality and Inner Life: A Study in Plato’s Gorgias (Macmillan, 1979).
- Love and Human Separateness (Basil Blackwell, 1987).
- Philosophy and the Philosophic Life: A Study in Plato’s Phaedo (Macmillan, 1992).
- Existential Critiques of Cartesianism (Macmillan, 1993).
- Free Will: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 1999).
- Wittgenstein’s Copernican Revolution (Palgrave, 2002).
- Philosophy as Criticism: Essays on Dennett, Searle, Foot, Davidson, Nozick (Continuum, 2011).
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