Self

Sobre el libro Self de Richard Sorabji publicado por Oxford al 2006:

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.
Contents: 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 survive death?; 18. Could we survive through time going in a circle?; 19. If we do not survive death, is it irrational to feel dismay?