John Locke’s influential account of personal identity emphasizes the importance of consciousness.  This had led many commentators to argue that Lockean selves just are consciousnesses.  Charles Taylor has mounted persuasive critiques of this “punctual” Lockean self; such a conception of the self is too thin and stands divorced from our values and moral agency.  This chapter shifts the focus from Locke’s views on personal identity to his views on personhood in an effort to show that Locke is sensitive to the kinds of worries raised by Taylor.  Lockean persons are more than consciousness.  In particular, the chapter focuses on Locke’s exploration and analysis of the complex faculty psychology undergirding consciousness and on the ways in which persons can be embodied.  This allows for a richer conception of the self.  It then argues that this richer conception better aligns with Locke’s own views about the value and importance of the self and with what he says regarding our moral agency and our duty of self-improvement.  Finally, the chapter shows that understanding Locke’s examination of human cognition as contributing to an analysis of the self allows us to resituate him with respect to some of his predecessors in seventeenth-century England.

This chapter traces notions of the self in the plays of early modern Spain. Drawing on a vast corpus of unpublished plays with the technique of “distant reading”, it examines the relation between self and free will in a period of increasing authoritarian control by both church and state. These plays demonstrate a deep preoccupation with maintaining a sense of personal freedom and choice despite the pressure of external constraints: Kallendorf proposes that the self is conceived as a “fortress” within which some sense of personal autonomy can be retained. This is very different from the more free-form relational concepts of the self that we have seen developed in the volume up to this point: the self remains grounded in the body and operative in society, but society places the body under heavy restraint.

This chapter considers how self-harm, suicide, and views of the afterlife reveal the radical shift between Greco-Roman tradition and Christianity with regard to the self. Classical Greek language uses the same auto- compound words to indicate self-willed action, suicide and kin-murder. From Homer through to Roman ideals of masculinity, significant action is generally understood with regard to the possibility of lasting fame, not with regard to a punishment or reward in an afterlife. In contrast to this picture, Christianity insists that each action is evaluated after death and contributes either to punishment or reward in an afterlife: life is a preparation for the afterlife. In particular, and in contrast to the earlier tradition, suicide becomes now a morally reprehensible act. For the faithful, however, martyrs become a model of willing death, which must be kept separate from suicide in evaluation. Ascetics enact a bodily self-harm to perfect their own holiness: physical self-harm becomes a positive gesture of self-fulfilment, dependent on the promise of a life after death. The Western model of the self is deeply influenced by this Christian modelling – and yet neither self-harm nor death play any role in Charles Taylor’s discussions of the history of the self

This chapter introduces the reader to the understanding of the human person articulated by Gregory Palamas (1296–1357) during the late Byzantine Hesychast controversy. The notion of the self elaborated and defended by Palamas is notable for its stress not only on the practice of inner prayer and stillness (“hesychia”) as crucial for the true cultivation of the self, but likewise for its robust defence of the embodiment of the self. Before discussing Palamas’ approach in detail, some background on the question of the relationship of body and soul in Greek patristic thought is offered, with special reference to Maximus the Confessor. This sets the scene for Palamas’ argumentation regarding the body as constitutive of the self together with the soul. Several ways in which Palamas both adopts and challenges classical views of the human self are presented. For instance, while the human soul might be detachable from the body, the human self, or person, is not. In some sense, moreover, every activity of the human self can be understood as a “common activity” of soul and body. The interweaving of body and soul in Palamas’ thought ultimately challenges a straightforward hylomorphic conception of the human being, notwithstanding certain commonalities.

This chapter explores ideas about the origins of the self. It focuses specifically on the various accounts of the origins of the self to be found in the works of Augustine, who is Charles Taylor’s second historical reference point (after Plato) as he builds his account of the sources of the modern self. However, the chapter diverges markedly from Taylor’s emphasis on radical reflexivity, the self discovered through introspection. It studies two aspects of the self for Augustine: first, the self’s formation in what Taylor himself calls “webs of interlocution”; second, and more innovatively, the chapter explores the scattered traces of Augustine’s thoughts on the pre-natal self, and on the mystery of the moment at which soul combines with body to become a human person. Augustine ponders this mystery but never makes a declarative statement on the topic, and the chapter suggests that we should listen to the Augustinian nescio (“I don’t know”) and its resultant embrace of indeterminacy, instead of the Cartesian cogito, as we think about the nature of the self.

Taking the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) and the “penitential Psalms” as sites for late antique and early medieval investigations of the effect of sin on the self, this chapter proposes that exegetes saw the self as malleable and permeable.  Commentaries and sermons framed the self as sinful but salvageable.  Changing views of agency, responsibility, and remedies produced shifts in representations of communal interests and penitential interpretations of well-known scriptural texts.  Protections against the penetrations and deformations of sin were erected in liturgical rituals and communal prayer.  The universal stain of sin fostered a porous relation between the individual and the community, each bound to the other in a metaphysical, corporate entity encasing all selves.  Christian views of individual autonomy created as well a spatial expanse of the individual interior in which the soul could wander, even become lost.  Emerging from that grim void to salvation was to grasp a lifeline of the penitential words of others, sung in concert, in an activation of universal memory, to transform the self into a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem.

According to Charles Taylor, the modern notion of the self is closely related to the notion of inwardness, for the self is taken to be something inside of us, accessible through introspection. Some medieval authors paved the way for this conception by identifying the self with the immaterial soul that somehow resides in the body. However, other authors clearly rejected an interiorization of the self, as this chapter argues. They took it to be a set of powers that is essentially related to external things and that becomes manifest in this relation. The chapter presents two case studies to spell out this alternative conception. It first analyzes Thomas Aquinas’s thesis that the self is present in bodily activities: whenever we perceive material objects, we become aware of ourselves as being directed toward them. The chapter then examines Peter of John Olivi’s thesis that the self is present in emotions: whenever we experience them, we cognize ourselves as being related to other people. It is therefore a bodily, relational, and social self that is at the core of two medieval theories.

In Sources of the Self, Taylor suggests that the ancient Greeks, despite possessing various linguistic devices for reflexive self-reference, did not have a way of making “self” into a noun. This nominalization of the self is, in his view, characteristic of the modern sense of selfhood. In fact, Aristotle does nominalize autos, the intensifier that functions in Greek much as “self” does in English, in three passages in Nichomachean Ethics IX where he describes a friend as another self. Taylor cites one of these passages in a footnote, commenting that “this doesn’t have quite the same force as our present description of human agents as ‘selves’”, but does not elaborate. This chapter considers what force it does have, exploring three senses of self in Aristotle. Two of them are familiar – the social self expounded in the first nine books of the Nicomachean Ethics and the more contemplative self emerging predominantly in EN X and in De Anima III. Much less familiar is the bodily self that can be discerned at various points in the De Anima and Metaphysics, and that is rather prominent in the Generation of Animals. This conception of the self has its source in the intimate connection between a psuchê and the particular body of which it is the form.

On Taylor’s account, Plato addresses the structures of goodness and the nature of the self by an extreme idealism, advocating the philosopher’s escape from the cave away from the banalities of ‘ordinary life’. Taylor draws the conclusion that this gives Plato a strictly externalist account, with no attention paid to the ‘interiority’ of the first-person standpoint. This chapter offers three brief considerations against this view. First, from metaphysics: the framing of the dialogues in the banalities of ordinary life corresponds to a running question about persons which is couched in terms of the persistence and development of selves, notably focused on personal pronouns. Second, from epistemology: Plato’s account of vision and the turning of the soul is much more complex than Taylor suggests, embedding the standpoint of the viewer into a response-dependent account of vision (and relying on the written context of the dialogues). Third, a consideration of virtue: Plato’s account of virtue is answerable both to ordinary life and to the self who leads it. The question ‘who will you become?’ (asked in the Protagoras and followed through in Republic and Euthydemus) is both more interesting and more challenging to Taylor’s conception of modernity than he can allow.

Mary Astell (1666–1731) relies on a Cartesian account of the self to argue that both men and women are essentially thinking things and, hence, that both should perfect their minds or intellects. In offering such an account of the self, Astell might seem to ignore the inescapable fact that we have bodies. This chapter argues that Astell accommodates the self’s embodiment along two main dimensions. First, she tempers her sharp distinction between mind and body by insisting on their union. The mind and body are united in such a way that they exert reciprocal causal influence and form a whole together. Second, she argues that the mind–body union is good, that the union has its own distinctive form of good or perfection, and that the mind should pursue this good alongside its own.

The introduction summarizes the contributions of Charles Taylor’s ambitious work, Sources of the Self, attending particularly to its introductory section “Identity and the Good.” It then highlights the ways in which this volume expands the conversation started by Taylor’s work: in its coverage of multiple disciplines and genres, not just philosophy and philosophical writing; in its attention to non-canonical sources and previously overlooked periods (Taylor passes directly from Augustine to Descartes); and in its development of Taylor’s “webs of interlocution” into consideration of how we – and our sources – might offer accounts of truly embodied selves, situated in ordinary lives. Finally, the introduction offers a summary of the chapters in this volume.

This chapter revisits the question of Renaissance individualism by focusing on the writings of two early propagators of the Italian Renaissance: Petrarch and Boccaccio. Through an analysis of their literary dialogues with central medieval authorities and institutions, it argues that both authors develop a highly personal, earthbound conception of a relational self. In their engagements with figures such as Augustine (for Petrarch) and Dante (for Boccaccio), they challenge traditional structures of order and meaning, questioning their relevance to contemporary experience and thereby opening a space for an individualism that may be described as “modern.” The chapter also demonstrates that these dialogues are not purely agonistic or triumphant, but reveal the costs and contradictions of this emerging individualism – whether in its lack of metaphysical grounding or its destabilizing effects on the social fabric. Rather than simply discarding old authorities, Petrarch and Boccaccio’s representations of the self often seek to reconcile the old with the new, individualism with tradition, and self with others, anticipating Charles Taylor’s emphasis on the relational nature of the self.

Although the main focus of the dialogue is practical deliberation rather than political and legal theory, it has over time provided stimulus to such theorizing. In this dialogue, the bond between citizen and state is portrayed as one of personal commitment. Strikingly, Plato does not invoke natural law, divine law, Kantian generalizations, or consequentialist theories where he might have done.