Self : ancient and modern insights about individuality, by Richard Sorabji

By Richard Sorabji

Drawing on classical antiquity and Western and japanese philosophy, Richard Sorabji tackles in Self the query of even if there's this sort of factor because the person self or just a move of cognizance. based on Sorabji, the self isn't an undetectable soul or ego, yet an embodied person whose life is obvious to determine. in contrast to a trifling movement of attention, it's anything that owns not just a realization but additionally a body.
       
Sorabji strains traditionally the retreat from a favorable suggestion of self and attracts out the consequences of those principles of self at the ideas of lifestyles and demise, asking: may still we worry dying? How may still our individuality have an effect on the best way we are living? via an astute examining of a massive array of traditions, he is helping us come to phrases with our uneasiness in regards to the topic of self in an account that would be on the vanguard of philosophical debates for years to come.
 
“There hasn't ever been a e-book remotely like this one in its great quantity of old references on rules approximately human identification and selfhood . . . . Readers unusual with the topic additionally want to know that Sorabji breaks new floor in giving specific consciousness to philosophers similar to Epictetus and different Stoics, Plotinus and later Neoplatonists, and the traditional commentators on Aristotle (on the final of whom he's the world's major authority).”—Anthony A. lengthy, Times Literary Supplement

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Extra resources for Self : ancient and modern insights about individuality, life, and death

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But what I have been speaking of is an embodied subject that is plain for all to see. chapter 2 The varieties of self and philosophical development of the idea I have said what I mean by ‘Self ’ and why I think there is such a thing. The next task is to see whether ancient philosophers had accounts of self. I think they most certainly did. Again and again, they show the same interest in the individual person, and especially the individual viewed from the first-person point of view as ‘me’. Moreover, like ourselves, they often express these ideas of self just as we do, by the use of pronouns.

J. P. , From Soul to Self, London and New York 1999. 9. Daniel Dennett, ‘Why everyone is a novelist’, Times Literary Supplement, 16 – 22 September 1988, p. 1016, and Consciousness Explained, Boston 1991. 10. , Models of the Self, Thorverton, UK, 1999, 1–24. 11. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford 1984, revised 1987. 12 what is the self ? I shall not try to answer the objections to selfhood in detail, except those of Parfit in chapters four and fifteen, and I could hardly do them justice in a short space.

27. , The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Cambridge Mass. 1999. 28. Daniel J. Povinelli and Timothy J. Eddy, ‘Specificity of gaze-following in young chimpanzees’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology 15, 1997, 213 –22. 26 Part I Existence of Self and philosophical development of the idea the idea of one party’s action getting aligned with the other party’s intention. The alignment and non-alignment of gaze, or intention and action, involves for the infant awareness of its own mental states, but only insofar as they need to be aligned with those of others.

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