Indian thought is well known for diverse philosophical and contemplative excursions into the nature of selfhood. Led by Buddhists and the yoga traditions of Hinduism and Jainism, Indian thinkers have
Indian thought is well known for diverse philosophical and contemplative excursions into the nature of selfhood. Led by Buddhists and the yoga traditions of Hinduism and Jainism, Indian thinkers have
Psychology, having come of age under the influence of Descartes and other champions of the thinking "I," has come to focus largely on what happens inside the self. This perspective expanded with the e
Self-knowledge is commonly thought to have become a topic of serious philosophical inquiry during the early modern period. Already in the thirteenth century, however, the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas developed a sophisticated theory of self-knowledge, which Therese Scarpelli Cory presents as a project of reconciling the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged self-access. Situating Aquinas's theory within the mid-thirteenth-century debate and his own maturing thought on human nature, Cory investigates the kinds of self-knowledge that Aquinas describes and the questions they raise. She shows that to a degree remarkable in a medieval thinker, self-knowledge turns out to be central to Aquinas's account of cognition and personhood, and that his theory provides tools for considering intentionality, reflexivity and selfhood. Her engaging account of this neglected aspect of medieval philosophy will interest readers studying Aquinas and the history of medieval philosophy more g
In concert with Buber, Rosenzweig, Heschel, Franz Fischer and Levinas, Meir outlines a conception of a selfhood that is grounded in dialogical thought. He focuses on the shaping of identity in present
The Two Selves takes the position that the self is not a "thing" easily reduced to an object of scientific analysis. Rather, the self consists in a multiplicity of aspects, some of which have a neuro-
The Self in Question offers a humanistic account of self-consciousness and personal identity, providing a much-needed rapprochement between Analytic and Phenomenological approaches to self-consciousne
What is it like to be a person today? To think, feel, and act as an individual in a time of accelerated social, cultural, technological, and political change? This question is inspired by the double meaning of subjectivity as both the 'first-personness' of consciousness (being a subject of experience) and the conditioning of that consciousness within society (being subject to power, authority, or influence). The contributors to this volume explore the perils and promise of the self in today's world. Their shared aim is to describe where we stand and what is at stake as we move ahead in the twenty-first century. They do so by interrogating the historical moment as a predicament of the subject. Their shared focus is on subjectivity as a dialectic of self and other, or individual and society, and how the defining tensions of subjectivity are reflected in contemporary forms of individualism, identity, autonomy, social connection, and political consciousness.
The Medieval Fold presents a theory of the medieval subject from 1050-1215, informed by contemporary theories of subjection and power from Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze.
Identity and Discrimination, originally published in 1990 and the first book by respected philosopher Timothy Williamson, is now reissued and updated with the inclusion of significant new material. W
How can we think about identities in the wake of feminist critiques of identity and identity politics? In Identities and Freedom, Allison Weir rethinks conceptions of individual and collective identit
How can we think about identities in the wake of feminist critiques of identity and identity politics? In Identities and Freedom, Allison Weir rethinks conceptions of individual and collective identit
We take it for granted that a person persists over time: when we make plans, we assume that we will carry them out; when we punish someone for a crime, we assume that she is the same person as the one who committed it. Metaphysical questions underlying these assumptions point towards an area of deep existential and philosophical interest. In this volume, leading metaphysicians discuss key questions about personal identity, including 'What are we?', 'How do we persist?', and 'Which conditions guarantee our identity over time?' They discuss whether personal identity is 'complex', whereby it is analyzable in terms of simpler relations such as physical or psychological features, or whether it is 'simple', namely something that cannot be analyzed in terms of more fundamental relations. Their essays offer an innovative discussion of this topic and will be of interest to a wide readership in metaphysics.
Morgan (German, Worcester College, UK) analyzes origins of the modern sense of Western self as discrete and unconnected. He draws on phenomenology, gender studies, and even contemporary neuroscience t
How might we produce our subjectivity differently? Indeed, what are we capable of becoming? This book addresses these questions with a particular eye to ethics, understood as a practice of living, and
Language users ordinarily suppose that they know what thoughts their own utterances express. We can call this supposed knowledge minimal self-knowledge. But what does it come to? And do we actually have it? Anti-individualism implies that the thoughts which a person's utterances express are partly determined by facts about their social and physical environments. If anti-individualism is true, then there are some apparently coherent sceptical hypotheses that conflict with our supposition that we have minimal self-knowledge. In this book, Anthony Brueckner and Gary Ebbs debate how to characterize this problem and develop opposing views of what it shows. Their discussion is the only sustained, in-depth debate about anti-individualism, scepticism and knowledge of one's own thoughts, and will interest both scholars and graduate students in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and epistemology.
The topic of introspection stands at the interface between questions in epistemology about the nature of self-knowledge and questions in the philosophy of mind about the nature of consciousness. What
In an increasingly multi-religious and multi-ethnic world, identity has become something actively chosen rather than merely acquired at birth. This book essentially analyzes the resources available to
'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.' These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry's collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on consciousness with the traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke and Hume. Experts in the field offer contrasting perspectives on matters such as the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, the notion of personhood and the epistemic access to one's own thoughts, desires or attitudes. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and others working on the central topics of consciousness and the self.
