Shaun Gallagher (editor) - Models of the Self

Title page

MODELS OF THE SELF

edited by

Shaun Gallagher

and

Jonathan Shear

Publisher information

2013 digital edition by Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic

PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic

Philosophy Documentation Center

PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA

World Copyright Imprint Academic, 1999

No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

reprinted 2001, 2002

Cover illustration: Claire Harper

Contributors

Jos Luis Bermdez

Philosophy, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland

James Blachowicz

Philosophy, Loyola University, 6525 North Sheridan Road, Chicago IL 60626, USA

Andrew Brook

Cognitive Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, Canada

George Butterworth

Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QU, UK

Jonathan Cole

Clinical Neurophysiology, Poole Hospital, Poole BH15 2JB, UK

Arthur J. Deikman

Psychiatry, UCSF, 401 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco CA 94143, USA

Mait Edey

PO Box 2681, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568, USA.

Robert K.C. Forman

Religion, Hunter College, CUNY, 695 Park Avenue, New York NY 10021, USA

Shaun Gallagher

Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Canisius College, Buffalo NY 14208, USA

Tamar Szab Gendler

Philosophy, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY 13244-1170, USA

Jeremy Hayward

Shambhala Training Institute, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

William Hirstein

Philosophy, William Patterson University, Wayne, NJ 07470, USA

Stephen W. Laycock

Philosophy, University of Toledo, Toledo OH 43606, USA

Maria Legerstee

Psychology, York University, Toronto, Canada

Anthony J. Marcel

MRC, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK

Mary Midgley

1a Collingwood Terrace, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE2 2JP, UK

Eric T. Olson

Churchill College, Cambridge CB3 0DS, UK

Jaak Panksepp

Psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA

Josef Parnas

University Dept. of Psychiatry, Hvidovre Hospital, Copenhagen, Denmark

Donald Perlis

Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742, USA

John Pickering

Psychology, Warwick University, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK

Jennifer Radden

Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Boston MA 02125, USA.

V.S. Ramachandran

Brain & Perception Laboratory, 1019, UCSD, La Jolla CA 92093, USA

Louis A. Sass

Clinical Psychology, GSAPP, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8085, USA

Jonathan Shear

Philosophy, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23284-2025, USA

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA

Galen Strawson

Jesus College, Oxford OX1 3DW, UK

Jun Tani

Sony Computer Science Laborator, 3-14-13 Higashi-gotanda, Tokyo, 141 Japan

Kathleen Wilkes

St. Hildas College, Oxford OX4 1DY, UK

Dan Zahavi

Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear, Editors Introduction

There is a long history of theoretical inquiry about human nature and the nature of the self. It stretches from the ancient tradition of Socratic self-knowledge in the context of ethical life to contemporary discussions of brain function in cognitive science. It includes a variety of theories developed in either first-person (from the point of view of the experiencing subject) or third-person (from the point of view of an external observer) approaches. On one reading of this history, the Western notion of the self continually narrows. The history of this issue begins with a conflict among the ancients. On one view, which comes to be represented most clearly by Aristotle, the issue is settled in terms of a composite and very complex human nature. Who I am is closely tied to my embodied existence and yet transcends it. The soul or psyche , as the form of the body, involves a multitude of life functions, including nutrition, reproduction, locomotion and sensation, but also action and philosophical contemplation. The rational (and for Aristotle this means social and linguistic) part of the soul lifts all of these functions to a higher, human and close to divine level. The other view, found as early as the Pythagoreans, clearly expressed in the texts of Plato, and later developed in Neoplatonic authors such as Augustine, held that genuine humanness is not the result of an integration of lower functions, but a purification of those functions in favour of a liberating spirituality. The animal elements are excluded from the human essence.

Along this same Platonic line, Augustine prefigures Descartes. For Descartes, and many modern thinkers, however, medieval spirituality was reducible to an important but narrow conception of rationality. The self is nothing other than the cogito, that is, ones own conscious mental events, a res cogitans , which is a mind composed of a unique, non-physical substance. At the beginning of the modern era, Descartes was led to the conclusion that self-knowledge provided the single Archimedean point for all knowledge. His thesis that the self is a single, simple, continuing and unproblematically accessible mental substance resonated with common sense, and quickly came to dominate European thought. Against this background, the specifically modern philosophical problem (or group of problems) pertaining to the nature of self identity arises and continues to define much of the contemporary discussion. Notably, it arises in the context of the first sustained discussion of consciousness in the philosophical literature, and at a precisely definable point in space and time, in an important few pages in John Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke defines it as the problem of personal identity. Briefly stated, the problem involves finding criteria that can account for the unity of the self in conscious experience over time. In consciousness itself we find a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as a self, the same thinking thing in different times and places (1690, # 9). To find the essence of the self, for someone like Locke, one needs to look within the central flux of the mind, the successive passage of consciousness. If we are anything, we must be able to find ourselves within the continuous becoming of experience which is constantly blooming forth from and continuously receding into what, without memory, would be nothingness.

Lockes solution was that consciousness maintains its identity over time only so far as memory extends to encompass past experience. This view almost immediately produced philosophical controversy. In the opinion of some, Locke was teetering on the edge of a dark precipice, the abyss of irrationality. Thus Bishop Butler (1736) and Thomas Reid (1785), expressing the anxiety that was common to both theologians and scientists of their age, helped to define the centrality of the problem of the self. If we cannot trust our own perceptions about ourselves, how can we know anything else? The very foundations of reason would be made unsure if we could not have certitude about the nature of the self. They had cause to worry. In particular, David Hume, in a very short time, was arguing that introspection does not display anything corresponding to what philosophers call the self, either Cartesian substance or Lockean identity.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself , I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. [We] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity (Hume, 1739, pp. 2523).