This dissertation exposes the significance of ‘self-disruption’ in ethical development (the process of understanding how to flourish), especially as incited through conversation. By ‘self-disruption’, I mean the experience of being torn away from self-concern (which is a self-reflective enterprise) by something other. ‘Self-concern’ here refers to one’s attachment to one’s projects and plans—including the future self that one seeks to produce (qua preservation of its current identity). This study engages the history of ethical thinking, but it is not antiquarian. To make my case, I primarily rely on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical metaphysics and critically interpret and draw from insights within 1) Kant’s account of the moral self, 2) Aristotle’s account of the virtuous soul, and 3) the teleological account of the self that we find in contemporary virtue ethics. My claim is that what is latent in each of these accounts is the pivotal role of having one’s attention arrested by ‘the other’, and that fostering this phenomenon belongs to the work of moral philosophy understood as moral cultivation. This research homes in on key discussions within Anglo-American ethics, particularly those that stem from the reevaluation of the nature and task of moral philosophy in the 20th-century. I am skeptical as to whether the resulting Aristotelian virtue ethics is as radical as its advocates claim, and I challenge its reliance on narrative coherence. I do not seek to deny the narrative dimensions of self-understanding, but I do want to underscore the ethical importance of welcoming their disruption.
