The Self : A History

Throughout the history of philosophy, the idea of a self as an irreducible part of a human being was often debated and contested. In this volume in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series, the contributors trace the history of how philosophers have addressed these self-related questions. Philosophers discussed include Plotinus and Augustine, Ibn Sina, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Leibniz, David Hume, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and others up through the 20th century.

The Self: A History explores the ways in which the concept of an ''I'' or a ''self'' has been developed and deployed at different times in the history of Western Philosophy. It also offers a striking contrast case, the ''interconnected'' self, who appears in some expressions of African Philosophy. The I or self seems engulfed in paradoxes. We are selves and we seem to be conscious of ourselves, yet it is very difficult to say what a self is. Although we refer to ourselves, when we try to find or locate ourselves, the I seems elusive. We can find human bodies, but we do not refer to ourselves by referring to our bodies: we do not know that we are raising our hands or thinking hard by looking at our arms or catching a glimpse of our furrowed brows in a mirror. The essays in this volume engage many philosophical resources--metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, philosophy of psychology and philosophy of language--to try to shed needed light on these puzzles.