Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, AndDeath
Author(s): Richard Sorabji (Author)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 6 Nov. 2008
Language: English
Print length: 412 pages
ISBN-10: 0199550131
ISBN-13: 9780199550135
Book Description
Richard Sorabji presents a brilliant exploration of the history of our understanding of the self, which has remained elusive and mysterious throughout the spectacular development of human knowledge of the outside world. He ranges from ancient to contemporary thought, Western and Eastern, to reveal and assess the insights of a remarkable variety of thinkers. He discusses a set of topics which are at the heart of our understanding of ourselves: personal identity; memory; the importance of seeing one’s life as a whole; the relation between self, intellect, will, and agency; self-awareness; the stream of consciousness; embodiment; death and survival. He rejects the view, found in various philosophical and religious writings, that the self is an illusion, and develops his own original conception of the self as essential to our ownership of our experience and our apprehension of the world.
Editorial Reviews
Review
So rich and complex a work as this can hardly be expected to elicit the complete agreement of any reader, but I am persuaded that it will prove intellectually fecund for all. ― Péter Lautner RHIZAI
From the Back Cover
Over the centuries, the idea of the self has both fascinated and confounded philosophers. From the ancient Greeks, who problematized issues of identity and self-awareness, to Locke and Hume, who popularized minimalist views of the self, to the efforts of postmodernists in our time to decenter the human subject altogether, the idea that there is something called a self has always been in steady decline. But for Richard Sorabji, this negation of the self is dispiriting. In “Self,” he sets out to recover the rich variety of positive accounts of the self from Antiquity right up to the present, while offering his own inspiring view of what precisely the self might be.Drawing on Eastern religion, classical Antiquity, and Western philosophy, Sorabji proceeds to tackle a number of thematic debates that have preoccupied philosophers over the ages, including the concept of the self, its sameness and mutability, the idea of the resurrection of the body and spirit, and the fear of death. According to Sorabji, the self is not an undetectable soul or ego, but an embodied individual whose existence is plain to see. It is also neither a linguistic creation nor a psychological fiction, but something that owns both a consciousness and a body. Ultimately, Sorabji argues, the demise of a positive idea of the self stems from much older and more pervasive problems of identity than we realize. Through an astute reading of this tradition, he helps us come to terms with our uneasiness about the subject in an account that will be at the forefront of philosophical debates for years to come.
About the Author
Richard Sorabji is Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy at King’s College London and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Besides co-editing The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions, and editing seventy volumes so far of The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, he is the author of Aristotle on Memory; Necessity, Cause and Blame; Time, Creation and the Continuum; Matter, Space and Motion; Animal Minds and Human Morals; and Emotion and Peace of Mind.
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