The Idea of the Self
Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century
- Author: Jerrold Seigel, New York University
- Date Published: February 2005
- availability: Available
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521605540
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What is the self? The question has preoccupied people in many times and places, but nowhere more than in the modern West, where it has spawned debates that still resound today. In this 2005 book, Jerrold Seigel provides an original and penetrating narrative of how major Western European thinkers and writers have confronted the self since the time of Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke. From an approach that is at once theoretical and contextual, he examines the way figures in Britain, France, and Germany have understood whether and how far individuals can achieve coherence and consistency in the face of the inner tensions and external pressures that threaten to divide or overwhelm them. He makes clear that recent 'postmodernist' accounts of the self belong firmly to the tradition of Western thinking they have sought to supersede, and provides an open-ended and persuasive alternative to claims that the modern self is typically egocentric or disengaged.
Read more- A panoramic survey of the self in western European thought from the seventeenth century to the present
- Challenges postmodernist critiques of the self and offers instead an alternative, historicist approach to the subject
- Examines key figures in European philosophy from Descartes to Derrida
Reviews & endorsements
'The Idea of the Self is quite simply the most important and convincing book about Western thinking about the self that I have encountered. The scholarship is both deep and sweeping. Seigel's readings of a wide variety of texts over more than three centuries are cogent and beautifully nuanced, and he is remarkably adept at placing his texts in their relevant national contexts. The result is intellectual history at its very best … quite an event.' Anthony la Vopa, Professor of History, North Carolina State University
See more reviews'… an overwhelming accomplishment, not only in its panoramic scope but also in its intense critical engagement with so many complex texts by so many important thinkers.' John E. Toews, University of Washington
'The Idea of the Self will inevitably provoke thought, discussion and debate. It should. It is simply the best book we now have on the subject, comprehensive, astute and profound, original in approach, forthright in the presentation of its own interpretation of the self … Any account of the idea of the self in modern times from now on will have to confront and absorb this magnificent accomplishment.' Modern Intellectual History
'In its scope, depth, richness and occasional brilliance, it is an astonishing achievement; in its insistence on the historical and structural complexity of ideas of the self, it is a necessary corrective to overschematic histories. It deserves - and will likely get - the closest attention.' Metapsychology Online Review
'Seigel has written an important and invaluable book.' The New Republic
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×Product details
- Date Published: February 2005
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521605540
- length: 734 pages
- dimensions: 228 x 153 x 44 mm
- weight: 1.14kg
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
Part I. Introductory:
1. Dimensions and contexts of selfhood
2. Between ancients and moderns
Part II. British modernity:
3. Personal identity and modern selfhood: Locke
4. Self-centeredness and sociability: Mandeville and Hume
5. Adam Smith and modern self-fashioning
Part III. Society and Self-Knowledge: France from Old Regime to Restoration:
6. Sensationalism, reflection, and inner freedom: Condillac and Diderot
7. Wholeness, withdrawal, self-revelation: Rousseau
8. Reflectivity, sense-experience, and the perils of social life: Maine de Biran and Constant
Part IV. The World and the Self in German Idealism:
9. Autonomy, limitation, and the purposiveness of nature: Kant
10. Purposiveness and Bildung: Herder, Humboldt, and Goethe
11. The ego and the world: Fichte, Novalis, Schelling
12. Universal selfhood: Hegel
Part V. The Past in the Present:
13. Dejection, insight, and self-making: Coleridge and Mill
14. From cultivated subjectivity to the polarities of self-formation in nineteenth-century France
15. Society and selfhood reconciled: Janet, Fouill, Bergson
16. Will, reflection, and self-overcoming: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
17. Being and transcendence: Heidegger
18. Deaths and transfigurations of the self: Foucault and Derrida
19. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.Instructors have used or reviewed this title for the following courses
- Metaphysics of Selfhood
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