Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and

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, one of our most celebrated living intellectuals, 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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Part 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 Part II - Personal identity over time. 3. Same person in eternal recurrence, resurrection, and teletransportation 4. Stoic fusion and modern fission: Survival cannot depend on what happens to someone else 5. Memory: Locke’s return to Epicureans and Stoics Part III - Platonism: impersonal selves, bundles, and differentiation. 6. Is the true self individual in the Platonist tradition from Plato to Averroës? 7. Bundles and differentiation of individuals 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 Part 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 Part 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 Part VII - Mortality and loss of self. 17. How might we survive death? 18. Could we survive through time going in a circle?