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Zusatztext 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. Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext 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. Zusammenfassung 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 variety of thinkers. Inhaltsverzeichnis I. Existence of Self and Philosophical Development of the Idea 1: The Self: is there such a thing? 2: The varieties of self and philosophical development of the idea II. Personal Identity Over Time 3: Same person in eternal recurrence, resurrection, and teletransportation 4: Stoic fusion and modern fission 5: Memory: Locke's return to Epicureans and Stoics III. Platonism: Impersonal Selves, Bundles, and Differentiation 6: Is the true self Individual in the Platonist tradition from Plato to Averroes? 7: Bundles and differentiation of individuals IV. Identity and Persona in Ethics 8: Individual persona vs. universalizability 9: Plutarch: narrative and a whole life 10: Self as practical reason: Epictetus' inviolable self and Aristotle's deliberate choice V. Self-Awareness 11: Impossibility of self-knowledge 12: Infallibility of self-knowledge: cogito and Flying Man 13: Knowing self through others versus direct and invariable self-knowledge 14: Unity of self-awareness VI. Ownerless Streams of Consciousness Rejected 15: Why I am not a stream of consciousness 16: The debate between ancient Buddhism and the Nyaya school VII. Mortality and Loss of Self 17: How might we ...
