The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity

1. Her actual words: “Start from the beginning and tell me everything you saw and what you think it means.”

2. Of course, there will be competing interpretations of this relevant and helpful information according to some of which there has been a murder and according to others not. What the Grace Kelly character really wants to know is whether there is an interpretation in either group that is better than any interpretation in the other group. In her view, an interpretation will be better only if it is more likely to correctly answer the question of whether there has been a murder.

3. This remarkable exchange was known to Plato (Theaetetus 152e) and subsequently widely discussed in late antiquity as “the Growing Argument.” See David Sedley, “The Stoic Criterion of Identity,” Phronesis 27 (1982): 255.

4. It may not have been until after the appearance of Christianity that this thought came to be used as a basis for suggesting that some (but only some) of the ways in which atoms come together and pull apart in an organism or thing are compatible with its remaining the same. An additional question suggested by Greek materialistic atomism is whether the change and stability of selves, or people, is to be understood on the same model as would be used to understand change and stability in general, or whether people are special, so that their change and stability is to be explained differently. So, for instance, at the end of the seventeenth century John Locke gave one account of the identity of inanimate objects, another of the identity of animate objects, and another of the identity of persons. Some other philosophers, by contrast, have given just one account for everything.

1. For a discussion of the origins of psychological terms in Greece, see, e.g., E. R. Dodd, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1976); R. P. Onians, The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Paul S. MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations About Soul, Mind, and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003).

2. See, for instance, the essays on this topic in James C. M. Crabbe, ed. From Soul to Self (London: Routledge, 1999).

3. Thomas Metzinger has recently suggested that out-of-body experiences (OBEs) may have played an important role in the prehistory of the concept of soul as a substance separate (and separable) from body. See Metzinger, “The Pre-Scientific Concept of a ‘Soul’: A Neurophenomenological Hypothesis About Its Origin,” in Auf der Suche nach dem Konzept/Substrat der Seele. EinVersuch aus der Perspektive der Cognitive (Neuro-) Science, ed. M. Peschl (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2003), 185–211.

5. Kathleen Freeman, ed., Ancilla to The Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmenta der Vorsokratiker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), fragments 129, 81, 89, and 45.

6. Freeman, Ancilla, fragment 91; and Plato, Cratylus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 421–74. In Cratylus’s view, in order to speak truly, one needs a world that is stable. This aspect of his view is not so different from Plato’s own view, except that Cratylus thought that no stable world exists. Plato, of course, posited nonmaterial “Forms,” or “Ideas,” as the stable objects of knowledge.

7. Plato, Symposium, 207d–208b, ed. and trans. C. J. Rowe (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1998), 91, 93.

8. In most of the Phaedo, Plato seems to be thinking of survival as the persistence of a naturally immortal, indivisible, individualistic soul, whether extended or not. Yet, at the end of the dialogue, he presents a myth in which the ideas of reincarnation, “guardian angels,” and “purgatory” are introduced. If one takes this myth seriously or goes beyond the Phaedo and attends to everything Plato said on the topic of survival of bodily death, a confusing picture emerges. In the Republic, for instance, Plato proposed what today we would call an empirical psychology, in which he recognized an irrational factor within the mind itself. And, in contrast to the Phaedo, where the passions are depicted as a distraction from without, in the Republic they are an integral part of the mind and even a source of needed energy for sensuous or intellectual activity. Interestingly, in the Phaedo Plato uses the same passage from Homer to illustrate the soul’s struggle with the body that he uses in the Republic to illustrate an internal dialogue between two “parts” of the soul.

9. Plato, Timeaus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (1871), 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 69b–70b.

10. But if Plato were a dualist in the modern sense, he would then be faced with the problem of explaining how what is material and extended can be affected by what is immaterial and unextended. Specifically, in the case of humans, he would be faced with the problem of explaining how a human’s immaterial, unextended part—the soul—and his or her material, extended part—the body—interact. This is the Achilles heel of dualism. No substance dualist, as holders of this view are called, has ever proposed a plausible solution to this problem. That is the main reason why there are so few substance dualists among professional philosophers today.

11. Two other aspects of Plato’s view of the soul deserve brief mention. First, in the Theaetetus, he endorses the view that different sense organs—eyes, ears, sense of touch, etc.—are responsible for conveying to the mind different data of sensation, such as sights, sounds, and feels. He claimed that these data then need to be combined in the mind in some appropriate way in order for the organism to perceive physical objects in an external world. To effect this combination, he supposed that the mind has a special faculty whose job it is to do this combining. Second, toward the end of the Cratylus, Plato comes close to introducing into the discussion of personal identity the hypothetical possibility of fission, which from the eighteenth century on has proved to be a potent source of theoretical development. In the Cratylus, fissionlike issues arise in the context of a conversation about names and other representations, such as images. The question is raised whether only a perfect image can represent or whether imperfect images also represent. Socrates says:

Let us suppose the existence of two objects. One of them shall be Cratylus, and the other the image of Cratylus, and we will suppose, further, that some god makes not only a representation such as a painter would make of your outward form and color, but also creates an inward organization like yours, having the same warmth and softness, and into this infuses motion and soul and mind, such as you have, and in a word copies all your qualities, and places them by you in another form. Would you say that this was Cratylus and the image of Cratylus, or that there were two Cratyluses?

Cratylus answers, “I should say that there were two Cratyluses.” Socrates replies:

Then you see, my friend, that we must find some other principle of truth in images, and also in names, and not insist that an image is no longer an image when something is added or subtracted. Do you not see that images are very far from having qualities which are the exact counterpart of the realities which they represent?

But then how ridiculous would be the effect of names on things, if they were exactly the same with them! For they would be the doubles of them, and no one would be able to determine which were the names and which were the realities.

(Plato, Cratylus 432a–e; 466, in The Collected Dialogues)

13. There are passages in Aristotle, in the so-called exoteric writings—especially the Eudemus, or On the Soul—which some scholars attribute to a very early stage in Aristotle’s career (an attribution other scholars have disputed). In these passages, Aristotle seems to take a Platonic view of human nature: the real human is simply the incorporeal soul; the body is at best an instrument of the soul and at worst its prison or mortal tomb. See Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development (1934; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 39–53.

14. Aristotle, De anima book 1, 1 (408b), and 3, 5, (430a, 10–25). This and subsequent translations of Aristotle are from Richard C. Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 9–10. Because of the inscrutability and importance of these passages, they bear another translation:

[Mind] seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed. And in fact mind as we have described it is what it is by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another which is what it is by virtue of making all things…. Mind in this sense of it is separable, impassible, unmixed, since it is in its essential nature activity…. When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activity because, while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is destructible), and without it nothing thinks.

(In Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, trans. W. D. Ross, Great Books of the Western World, vol. 8 [Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952], 638, 662)

The main puzzle about Aristotle’s conception of nous (i.e., intellect or mind), which arises in both of these translations, is whether to equate the nous capable of “becoming all things” (i.e., nous tō panta ginesthai, the possible or potential intellect) with the nous capable of “making all things”(i.e., nous tō panta poein, the active or agent intellect) or, instead, to equate it with the “passible intellect” (i.e., ho pathōtikos nous, passive intellect). Most current scholars equate the possible intellect with the passible intellect, thus implying that it is corruptible. On this interpretation, only the agent intellect is incorruptible and immortal. But a number of medieval commentators, most notably Thomas Aquinas, held the view that the possible and agent intellects are one and the same intellect, which is incorruptible and immortal, and that the passive intellect is just another name for imagination. A recent defender of this latter view is Mark Ambrose, “Aristotle’s Immortal Intellect,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association: Person, Soul, and Immortality, Vol. 75, 2001 (New York: American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2002). We will see further discussion of this issue in later chapters.

16. According to Richard Sorabji, 700 years after Aristotle’s death Neoplatonists invented the view that according to Aristotle nous is immortal. They did this, he said, in order to counter the criticism, made by Christians, that pagan philosophers were inconsistent. See, Sorabji, “Soul and Self in Ancient Philosophy,” in From Soul to Self, ed. M. James C. Crabbe (New York: Routledge, 1999), 10.

17. Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. and trans H. Tredennick, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1936), 12.8, 1074a; see also Metaphysics 5.6, 1016b3. See also Udo Thiel, “Individuation,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 212–62.

18. In his Errors of the Philosophers, Giles of Rome (1247–1316 C.E.) relies on this passage from Aristotle to argue that Aristotle would deny the possibility of resurrection; in Medieval Philosophy: Selected Readings from Augustine to Buridan, ed. H. Shapiro (New York: Random House, 1964), 384–413.

19. Quoted by Diogenes Laertius. Quoted here from David Sedley, “Epicurus,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig (London: Routledge, 1988), http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/A050.

20. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 124, cited by Tad Brennan, “Immortality in Ancient Philosophy,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig (London: Routledge, 2002), http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/A133.

21. We are indebted in this paragraph especially, but also in this entire section, to A. A. Long, “Stoic Philosophers on Persons, Property-Ownership, and Community,” in Aristotle and After, ed. Richard Sorabji (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1997), 13–32. Long explains that in the quotations included in this section, the selection and translation of which is due to him, he has translated the Greek word, “oikeiosis,” as “appropriation,” with the understanding that “the forcible connotations of appropriation should be discounted” and that “the word [oikeiosis] primarily refers to a process or activity, innate in all animals, which explains why, from the moment of birth, they behave in self-regarding ways.”

22. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, book 7, in Long, “Stoic Philosophers,” 25.

24. Hierocles, Elements of Ethics, col. VI, 23–53, in Long, “Stoic Philosophers,” 26.

26. David Sedley, “The Stoic Criterion of Identity,” Phronesis, 27 (1982): 255, 259.

27. Hippocrates, “On the Sacred Disease,” in “Hippocratic Writings,” in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 10 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 154, 156.

28. See Heinrich von Staden: “Body, Soul, and Nerves: Epicurus, Herophilus, Erasistratus, the Stoics, and Galen,” in Psyche and Soma—Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, ed. John P. Wright and Paul Potter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79–116.

29. Galen (130–200 C.E.), for instance, in explaining the operations of the nervous system in thought and action, found it expedient to give at least lip service to the possible role of an immaterial soul. In general, however, he was more strongly influenced by Aristotle than by Plato and usually rejected even the hint of dualism found in Aristotle. For instance he asserted, “If the reasoning part of the soul exists, it is mortal, because it also represents the mixtures of the humours in the brain.” He went on to suggest that reasoning is not a defining feature of the human soul but just another function of brain activity that is present in various degrees among animals, including human animals. See Gregory Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology (New York: W. W. Norton, 1941); and Rudolph E. Spiegel, Galen on Psychology, Psychopathology, and Function of Diseases of the Nervous System (New York: S. Karger AG, 1973), 130.

30. The Skeptics Pyrrho (c. 360–c. 272 B.C.E.) and Sextus Empiricus (c. 150–c. 225 C.E.), for instance, distinguished sharply between what is known directly and what must be inferred.

31. On these issues see Voula Tsouna, The Epistemology of the Cyrenaic School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Tim Crane and Sarah Patterson, eds., History of the Mind-Body Problem (London: Routledge, 2000); Anita Avramides, Other Minds (London: Routledge, 2001); as well as John P. Wright and Paul Potter, eds. Psyche and Soma—Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

1. Heraclitus, (fragment 11), in Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmenta der Vorsokratiker, ed. and trans. Kathleen Freeman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971).

2. Cicero, De Offices, trans. Walter Miller (New York: MacMillian, 1908), book 1, 30:107, 110, 35:126; De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, trans. H. Rackham (New York: MacMillian, 1914), book 3, 75.

3. Epictetus, The Manual, part 17, in The Discourses of Epictetus, trans. P. E. Matheson (New York: The Heritage Press, 1968), 279, with some emendations by the authors.

4. Epictetus, Discourse 1.2, in The Discourses of Epictetus, trans. P. E. Matheson (New York: The Heritage Press, 1968), 9–10.

5. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. George Long (London: Collins’ Clear-Type Press, n.d.), book 2, 14:104.

6. The translations in the passages quoted are from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. R. E. Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951).

7. Other scholars who translate these crucial passages in De Rerum Natura differently include: William H. D. Rouse, “Even if time shall gather together our matter after death and bring it back again as it is now placed, and if once more the light of life shall be given to us, yet it would not matter one bit to us that even this had been done, when the recollection of ourselves has once been broken asunder” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924; 3rd rev. ed. reprint, 1966); H. A. J. Munro, “And if time should gather up our matter after our death and put it once more into the position in which it now is, and the light of life be given to us again, this result even would concern us not at all, when the chain of our self-consciousness has once been snapped asunder” (in Whitney J. Oates, ed., The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers [New York: The Modern Library, 1940]). However, even though the word “repetentia,” which Latham translated as identity, is translated by Rouse as recollection of ourselves and by Munro as self-consciousness, the point of Lucretius’s reflections remains basically the same. It is that one’s body and spirit, including one’s memories, must be united and exist continuously into a future about which it is rational for one to feel egoistic concern. Once this continuity is broken, as it is at bodily death, then rational egoistic concern is no longer possible. A natural way to express this point is that once this continuity is broken, then rational egoistic concern is no longer possible because one no longer exists.

8. Quoted in D. J. Enright, ed., The Oxford Book of Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 28. In this connection, see the fascinating remark on Lucretius by Pierre Bayle, A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, trans. J. P. Bernard, T. Birch, and J. Lockman, 10 vols. (London: J. Bettenham, 1734–1741): “The same atoms which compose water are in ice, in vapours, in clouds, in hail and snow: those which compose wheat are in the meal, in the bread, the blood, the flesh, the bones etc. Were they unhappy under the figure or form of water, and under that of ice, it would be the same numerical substance that would be unhappy in these two conditions; and consequently all the calamities which are to be dreaded, under the form of meal, concern the atoms which form corn; and nothing ought to concern itself so much about the state or lot of the meal, as the atoms which form the wheat, though they are not to suffer these calamities under the form of wheat” (note Q). In addition, according to the late-eighteenth-century philosopher Abraham Tucker, Lucretius was forced to consider the objection that “the atoms, some thousands of years hence, after infinite tumblings and tossings about, would fall into their former situation, from whence a thinking, feeling soul must necessarily result: but he denied that this would be the same soul. Just as when a company of dancers assemble together and dance for six hours, the whole is one ball: but if they leave off at the end of three hours, and a fortnight afterwards a second party is proposed whereon they meet to dance for three hours again, this is a ball too, but another ball distinct from the former. So the soul, which is but a dance of atoms, cannot be the same … [and] therefore, whatever wretched fortune may befal it, we, that is, our present souls, have no concern therein” (Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued, 7 vols. [1805; reprint, New York: Garland, 1997], 7:11–12).

9. Plotinus, Ennead 4.2.1.2, in Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 17:140.

1. Christianity emerged from Judaism and adopted the Hebrew Bible as its Old Testament. And Islam, in the Qur’an, accepts the Hebrew prophets and Jesus as precursors of Muhammad and recounts the basic storyline in the earlier scriptures. All three religious traditions trace their ancestry to Abraham.

2. For example, “He that toucheth the dead body of any man shall be unclean seven days” (Num. 25:16–17).

3. As translated in Neil Gillman, The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1997), 135. Note that the passage quoted suggests the identification of self with dead body, not soul.

4. Philo, “The Unchangeableness of God,” The Works of Philo Judaeus, the Contemporary of Josephus, trans. Charles Duke Yonge (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854–1890), 36:176.

5. For details, see Raymond Martin, The Elusive Messiah: A Philosophical Overview of the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).

6. Ibid. Also see E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989), 7–15, 21–24.

10. Our account is based in part on Theo K. Heckel, “Body and Soul in St. Paul,” in Psyche and Soma—Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, ed. John P. Wright and Paul Potter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 117–32.

11. “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one.” Plato, Phaedrus, 15:279b, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953).

20. See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 23 ff.

1. More graphically, the Christian apologist Arnobius (fl. 300) characterized the body as “a disgusting vessel of urine” and “a bag of shit.” See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 31, 61.

2. Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, and A. C. Coxe (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1977), 2.8:153.

3. On Chrysippus, see Aphrodisias, On Prior Analytics, 180, 33–36: 181, 25–31. Simplicius, Physics, 886, 12–16, writes: “The Stoics say that the same I comes into existence in the recurrence. But unsurprisingly they ask whether the present and former I are numerically one through being the same in essence (ousia), or whether I differ because of the different location in time of different cosmogonies.” Also see Origen, Against Celsus, 4.68; 5.20. All of these are cited in and translated by Richard Sorabji, in unpublished material, from whom we learned of the existence of these passages. For more on Stoic views, see Richard Sorabji, “Soul and Self in Ancient Philosophy,” in From Soul to Self, ed. M. James C. Crabbe (New York: Routledge, 1999), 22–23. Also see Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. and intro. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4.68, 5.20.

4. Minucius Felix, Octavius, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, and A. C. Coxe (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 4.6:179.

6. Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, and A. C. Coxe (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 3.8:551, 3.57:590.

7. Origen, On First Principles, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, and A. C. Coxe (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 1.5:260.

9. Arnobius (c. 303), who wrote at about the same time as Origen, affirms in opposition to the Platonic doctrine of preexistence that souls are created. However, he makes the creating agent a being inferior to God, and he asserts the gratuitous character of the soul’s immortality, denying that it is naturally immortal. In effect, he claimed that we survive bodily death not because of the kinds of beings we are but due to God’s grace.

10. Origen, fragment on Psalm 1.5, cited by Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 64.

14. Methodius of Olympus, From the Discourse on the Resurrection, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, and A. C. Coxe (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 4.6:365 (italics added).

15. Methodius, De resurrectione, B 2, chap. 6, cited by Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 70.

16. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace, 2nd ser. (Peabody, Mass..: Hendrickson, 1995), 5:433.

20. In the last years of the fourth century, Jerome wrote a ferocious polemic against John of Jerusalem (fl. 390), in large part for John’s having been a follower of Origen on the question of resurrection. Jerome’s attack was a continuation of an earlier critique of Origen by Epiphanius (315?–403), which was itself based on Methodius’ critique of Origen. Although the tone of Jerome’s letter is arrogant and contemptuous, for more than a thousand years it had an profound influence on Christian theologians.

21. Jerome, letter to Pammachius against John of Jerusalem, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace, 2nd ser. (Peabody, Mass..: Hendrickson, 1995), 6:436–8.

22. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 152–62.

25. Augustine, De Vere Religione, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff, 1st ser. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 39.72.

26. Augustine, City of God, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Rev. Marcus Dods, 1st ser. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 13.24.2:259.

29. In addition to worries about resurrection, Christians had two other reasons to be interested in the notion of person. The first of these was to explain how Jesus could be both god and man. The second was to make sense of the doctrine of the Trinity. From the second to the sixth century, the theological and philosophical work that these puzzles generated would be the center of debates, both between Christians and pagans and among Christians, who would vie with each other for doctrinal domination of the church. The question about Christ’s nature, which arose soon after the initial reports of his Resurrection, was posed first. It was not settled until the Council of Calcedon, in the sixth century. The doctrine of the Trinity was doctrinally resolved at the Council of Constantinople, in the latter part of the fourth century.

In general, interpretations of the Trinity take one of two forms. The first is that of the Greek fathers and of the Latin fathers before Augustine, who start from the plurality of persons and proceed to the assertion that the three persons are really one God. Their problem is how to arrive at one from three, their answer is “consubstantiality” of the Son and Holy Spirit with the Father. Dangers to be avoided, in this approach, are tri-theism and Arianism (the subordination of one or more persons of the Trinity). The other form of interpretation starts out from the unity of God and moves to the trinity of persons. Now the problem is how to arrive at three from one and how to show that the three are equal in stature to one another and to the one. The problem on this approach is how to ensure that the three are not merely modes of the one (modalism, or Sabellianism). Augustine, who presented his view of the Trinity in a number of works, but principally in On the Trinity, assumed that God is a single unified mind, and then looked for analogies between the Trinity and the human mind that would throw light on the mystery. The importance of the Trinity debate for the more central concerns of the present book is basically that the church fathers and subsequent Christian philosophers and theologians, in trying to make sense of the dogma that God is both three and one, were forced to make distinctions and identify questions that subsequently nourished thinking about more mundane issues having to do with the nature and status of earthly persons.

1. Not much of Plato or Aristotle had been translated into Latin. There was more, but not a great deal, that had been translated from the works of Greek Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Even prior to this period, it seems unlikely that Aristotle’s works were known to Lucretius, Seneca, and Augustine. Cicero was acquainted with some works of Aristotle that are now lost, but he barely mentions the writings that would come into prominence in Europe in the thirteenth century. During the Early Middle Ages there was a vigorous development of Arab and Jewish philosophy, but it occurred mostly outside of Europe. Almost all of Aristotle’s writings, but only a few works of Plato, including the Republic, the Laws, and the Timaeus, were translated into Arabic. A number of Neoplatonist writings were also translated into Arabic. In general, Arab philosophers learned about Plato mainly from Aristotelian commentators, but Alfarabi wrote a paraphrase of Plato’s Laws, and Averroës, a paraphrase of Plato’s Republic. Under the influence of the Arabs, medieval Jewish thinkers, including Avicebron (Ibn Gabirol) and various Jewish mystics, were strongly influenced by Neoplatonism.

2. During the thirteenth century, when Aristotelianism was becoming dominant among Latin philosophers, Latin translations were being made of Plato’s Phaedo and Meno, as well as of a number of works by Neoplatonists.

3. Earlier, Cicero had summarized the positions of a number of schools of Greek philosophy and had even translated one of Plato’s dialogues. Victorinus, a contemporary of Augustine, had translated Plotinus and some texts of Aristotelian and Stoic logic. Many of the works available at this time, such as those of Lucretius and the translation of Plotinus, were no longer available during the High Middle Ages and had to be rediscovered and translated again in the Renaissance. For instance, Plotinus was available only in fragments collected by the Arabs in what was called Aristotle’s Theology. The full works of Plotinus were eventually translated into Latin again by Ficino, in 1492. See H. J. Blumenthal, Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity: Interpretations of the De anima (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 173.

4. Commentaries on Aristotle’s views on the soul that would eventually pass to the Scholastics and Renaissance scholars were of two sorts: those by the Aristotelians themselves, in particular Alexander of Aphrodisias and later Themistius; and those by Neoplatonic commentators, such as Philoponus and Simplicius. Alexander and Themistius, in particular, would significantly influence the direction that Arab philosophy would take, especially with respect to theories of the intellect. These works, as well as a fragment of Philoponus commenting on De anima, 3.4–3^.8, were available to Aquinas, when developing his own Aristotelian view. Other writings of Philoponus and Simplicius would be translated only during the Renaissance.

5. Themistius concluded by remarking that while it was reasonable of Aristotle to pose for himself the problem of why we do not remember after death whatever we think before death, “the solution,” entailed by Aristotle’s statements, is “that the productive intellect is unaffected, while the passive intellect is perishable” (430a24–25). Themistius, Themistius’ Paraphrase of Aristotle De anima 3.4^-8, in Two Greek Aristotelean Commentators on the Intellect: The De Intellectu Attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius’ Paraphrase of Aristotle De anima 3.4^-8, ed. and trans. Frederic M Scroeder and Robert Todd (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 94–95.

6. In their attempts to deal with the Aristotelian corpus, the Scholastics had also to deal with their own previous development of Christian Neoplatonism. Augustine, of course, was the major source and the transmitter of Plotinian Neoplatonism. But there were other Neoplatonic sources: most importantly pseudo-Dionysius, who presented a cosmological “celestial hierarchy,” which was a thinly veiled version of Proclus’s Elements of Theology. As we shall see shortly, these works influenced John Scotus Eriugena and, through him, the Scholastics. In addition, the Scholastics also had the works of a Christian Neoplatonic commentator on Aristotle, John Philoponus (c. 490–c. 575), who read into Aristotle’s De anima that the rational soul is a substance that is also the form of the human body. Unlike Themistius, he was certain that each individual has his own rational soul, which is immortal. He also had an interesting view of resurrection, according to which no material from the original body is recovered. Rather, at the resurrection, there will be a new immortal body of entirely different material. In making this suggestion, he was not bothered about whether the resurrected person was a new person, so long as it had the same soul as one who died.

7. John Scotus Eriugena, On the Division of Nature, vol. 8, in Medieval Philosophy: From St. Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa, ed. J. F. Wippel and A. B. Wolter (New York: Free Press, 1969), 137.

8. Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1904), 395.

10. Quoted in Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 81–82.

12. Abelard and Heloise, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 132–33, 115.

13. Quoted in Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 20.

14. A century earlier, in Muslim Spain, Ibn Hazm (994–1064), in The Dove’s Necklace, analyzed and celebrated romantic love, which he saw as a physical, moral, and spiritual union with the beloved. In twelfth-century Europe, William of Saint Thierry, in The Nature and Dignity of Love (1120?), distinguished five kinds of love, all of which he said might be good to varying degrees. By contrast, Augustine, the most introspective writer of his era, gave little attention to psychological nuance for its own sake and usually depicted differing human motives simply as choices between good and evil.

15. Dostoevsky, for instance, was the first to write what is now called a polyphonic novel, in which there is no overarching authoritative account of the events depicted in the story (Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel [Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1973]). For a contemporary historian who deals with much the same issue, see J. E. Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon, 1994).

17. C. S. Lewis was prompted to remark, “Real changes in human sentiment are very rare—there are perhaps three or four on record—but I believe that they occur, and that this is one of them.” Quoted in Morris, Discovery, 108.

18. Honorius Augustodunensis, Clavis Physicae, ed. Paolo Lucentini (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1974), 307:60; as translated by Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 147.

1. To add to the confusion, a variety of related problems came to the fore that had not previously seemed so pressing: Is the rational soul passed from parents to children biologically? If, as almost everyone believed, it is not transmitted biologically, how is it related to the vegetative and sensitive souls, which are transmitted biologically? Is the rational soul different in kind from the souls of beasts? Can individual humans have more than one soul? And so on.

2. Cited by Richard C. Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 26.

5. Albert set himself the task of translating into Latin an authentic version of Aristotle. As a teacher of theology at Cologne and Paris, he had among his students Thomas Aquinas, whose genius he recognized and whose future greatness he foretold. The disciple accompanied his master on his travels, returning with him, in 1248, to Cologne, where Albert was a professor and Aquinas secured his first academic appointment. Subsequently, they parted company physically but never spiritually. In 1274, as Albert was on his way to the Council of Lyons, he was informed of the death of his former and much-beloved student, which prompted him to declare that “the Light of the Church” had been extinguished.

6. Albert, Summa Theologica, part 1, tract 12, question 69, ad. 2, cited in Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul, 98.

7. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, 7.5.2, cited in Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul, 99–100.

8. Cited in Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 236–37, 240–41.

9. Thanks to Aquinas’s having been a student of Albert, he had access early on to a better text of Aristotle than had been available to others. He thought that many of the problems that conservatives had with Aristotle were due to their working from a corrupt text. To the conservatives, his break with Augustinianism was so shocking that in 1270, and again in 1277, they persuaded the bishop of Paris to condemn some propositions to which he subscribed.

10. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.118.2, ad. 2, cited in Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul, 110.

11. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.77.8, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 19, part 1 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 406.

12. From a contemporary, secular point of view, it’s hard even to understand what this doctrine of Aquinas could possibly mean. Whatever it means, he borrowed it from Liber de Causis, which he knew was based on Proclus’s Neoplatonic Elements of Theology. Aquinas, On Being and Essence, trans. A. Maurer (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949), 4:44.

13. Commentary to I Corinthians 15:17–19, lect. 11, cited in Carl N. Still, “Do We Know All After Death? Thomas Aquinas on the Disembodied Soul’s Knowledge,” in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association: Person, Soul, and Immortality, Vol. 75 (New York: American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2002), 108.

15. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. Charles O’Neil (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1975), 4.80–81:307.

16. In December 1273, toward the end of his life, Aquinas, while saying mass, had a mystical experience. Subsequently, he suspended work on the third part of his Summa Theologica and resolved to write no more, saying: “All I have written seems to me like so much straw compared with what I have seen and with what has been revealed to me.” F. C. Copleston, Aquinas (1955; reprint, Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1961), 10.

18. Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas Against the Averroists: On There Being Only One Intellect, trans. Ralph McInerny (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1993), para. 69. It is worth noting that Aquinas’s argument here, which relies, at least in part, on our consciousness of personal ownership of our acts of understanding, is not entirely successful as an argument against the Averröists. This is because intuitive self-consciousness can be accounted for in different ways, without requiring that the soul, itself, be unified. Deborah Black, “Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Aquinas’s Critique of Averroës’s Psychology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 31 (1993): 349–85, argues that on Aristotelian principles, which Aquinas shares with Averroës, the nature of soul can be known only indirectly, through its activities, rather than directly, through self-consciousness. As Aquinas says in the Summa Theologica, “the presence of the mind does not suffice” for knowledge of the soul, “but rather, diligent and subtle inquiry is required” (1.87.1; cited in Black, 357). And this “subtle inquiry” into the powers and activities of soul can lead to different conclusions. Black suggests that Averroës could answer Aquinas by arguing that it is the imagination, or passive intellect, by which we take ownership of acts of the material/agent intellect. For, on Aristotelian assumptions, an image is always perfectly correlated with any act of the intellect, and the image is formed wholly by corporeal activities of the human soul. So even if the intellect comes from without and is singular, any abstract understanding of the particular, is associated with a particular image and thereby can be experienced as owned by the particular soul.

20. Udo Thiel, “Individuation,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, vol. 1, edited by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 215.

21. Dante, Convivio, 2.8.8; as cited in Nancy Lindheim, “Body, Soul, and Immortality: Some Readings in Dante’s Commedia,” MLN 105, no. 1 (1990): 5.

1. Quoted in Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 125. Throughout this chapter we are indebted to Kristeller.

2. Giannozzo Manetti, for instance, toward the middle of the fifteenth century, wrote in reply to Pope Innocent III’s treatise on the miserable condition of people a lengthy essay on human dignity and excellence, embellishing his points with classical quotations.

3. There was, however, a downside. Theory languished. The humanists failed to provide new insights into natural philosophy, theology, law, medicine, and mathematics. Instead, their influence on these fields was external and indirect, due almost entirely to their providing new classical source materials.

4. Ficino, Platonic Theology, book 3, chap. 2, trans. and quoted in Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 129.

5. Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, trans. Josephine L. Burroughs, quoted in Paul Kristeller, “Ficino and Pomponazzi on the Place of Man in the Universe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944): 228.

7. Marsilio Ficino, from De Vita Libri Tres (1489), quoted in Paul S. MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations about Soul, Mind, and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003), 232.

8. Paul Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 327.

9. Ficino, Platonic Theology, book 14, chap. 3, quoted in Kristeller, Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, 238.

13. Francesco Piccolomini, Librorum ad scientiam de natura attinentium (Frankfurt, 1597), 876–77, quoted and trans. in Emily Michael, “Renaissance Theories of Body, Soul, and Mind,” in Psyche and Soma, ed. John P. Wright and Paul Potter, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 161.

14. John H. Randall Jr. The Career of Philosophy: From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 85.

15. Quoted in Rudolf Steiner, Eleven European Mystics, trans. Karl E. Zimmer (New York: Rudolf Steiner, 1971), 201.

17. Paracelsus, The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus, 2 vols., ed. and trans. A. E. Waite (Berkeley: Shambala, 1976), 1:176.

19. Paracelsus, The Diseases That Deprive Man of His Reason, Such as St. Vitus Dance, Falling Sickness, Melancholy, and Insanity, and Their Correct Treatment, trans. G. Zilboorg, in Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus, ed. and trans. C. L. Temkin, G. Rosen, G. Zilboorg, and H. E. Sigerest (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 142.

20. According to Francis Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), Bruno’s philosophy was based on second-century Hermetic texts that had been translated by Ficino. More recently others have argued that Pythagorean doctrines are more fundamental to Bruno’s views. See, for instance, H. Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).

21. Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. A. D. Imerti (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 76.

23. Quoted in Peter Burke, “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 19.

24. As Burke has pointed out, “the advice that Polonius gives to Laertes in Hamlet “to thine own self be true” may have been a commonplace, but it was a relatively new commonplace” (ibid., 20).

25. Montaigne, “Three Kinds of Association” (1588), in The Complete Works of Montaigne, ed. and trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), 629.

26. Montaigne, “On Experience,” in Essays, ed. and trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 344.

27. Montaigne, “To the Reader,” in The Complete Works of Montaigne, ed. and trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), 2.

28. Montaigne, “On Giving the Lie,” in The Complete Works of Montaigne, ed. and trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), 504.

29. Montaigne, “On Friendship,” in Essays, ed. and trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 102.

30. Montaigne, “On Cannibals,” in Essays, ed. and trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), 106.

31. Timothy Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), has argued for a competing view of Montaigne, according to which subjectivity, which in his view requires modern individualism with its encapsulated inner self, does not emerge until late in the seventeenth century, in the Penses of Pascal and in the possessive individualism of Locke. Reiss claims that virtually all previous thinkers, including Montaigne and even Descartes, who is a kind of transition figure, viewed the self within the context of relations to ever widening circles of social life and hence were not really concerned with subjectivity at all. In Reiss’s Montaigne, for instance, there is no concern with subjectivity but only private reflection. We see no reason to think of subjectivity so narrowly. Doing so robs one of the ability to track the incremental ways in which concern with subjectivity expanded in stages over nearly two thousand years. In our view, in addition to what Reiss thinks concern with subjectivity involves, it involves also such things as concern with differing inner perspectives on the same outer events, and it may be found in such figures as Augustine, Avicenna, Abelard and Heloise, Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes, among others. In addition, thinking of subjectivity in Reiss’s way obscures the contribution made by the Christian dogma of personal survival of bodily death to the growth of individualism in the West.

1. Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (1623), in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, ed. and trans. Stillman Drake (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), 237–38.

2. Mechanization, at the theoretical level, was a goal, rather than a reality. In Newton’s original view, gravitational attraction was an exception, an idea that Cartesians, in particular, strongly resisted.

3. Descartes thus replicated in a more general form Galileo’s more local invention of the subjective. To the present day, philosophers of mind as a whole have not resolved this issue. The nub of the difficulty is that after Descartes it has not been possible merely to assume that the mind and body are unified. It has become necessary to explain both how they are unified and how we can reliably acquire knowledge of body and mind. This has not been an easy task. Even so, this dual project, performed against the backdrop of a mechanized nature, is what was primarily responsible intellectually for transforming the premodern into the modern world.

In finding a place for the self in such a world, Descartes opted for a basically Platonic (intuitive) view of the origins of knowledge, relinquishing whatever faith he may have had in the senses. He argued, as Augustine and Avicenna had argued earlier, that it is possible to doubt altogether the existence of body but not to doubt one’s own existence, for the very act of doubting requires that one exist as a doubter. In other words, while experience seems to ensure that an experiencer exists, it does not seem to ensure that an external world of material objects exists—for all we know, the world of our experience could be part of an elaborate dream. All that is revealed in the immediate testimony of consciousness seems to be mental, not the external objects that everyone naturally believes are the causes of our experiences. This seeming realization elevated the task of proving the existence of the external (material) world—including one’s own body—into a major metaphysical and epistemological problem.

Descartes tried to solve this problem—that is, to prove that external, material objects exist—first, by proving that God exists and is not a deceiver and then by arguing that if there were no external world and had God not given us any faculty the proper exercise of which would enable us to discover that our natural belief in an external world is mistaken, then God would be a deceiver. It follows, he claimed, that there must be an external world. Many subsequent thinkers thought that the problem of how to prove the existence of an external world is genuine but were unimpressed with Descartes’s solution. This, together with epistemological foundationalism, were among the main ways in which Descartes set the agenda for the next three hundred years of philosophy of mind.

4. Some recent commentators on Descartes doubt that he made this mistake. In their view, his point was that if extension were an essential attribute of the nature of humans, humans would know this intuitively. Since they do not, extension cannot be an essential attribute of humans. Hence, it is at best only an accidental, or contingent, attribute. See, for instance, Marleen Rozemond, Descartes’s Dualism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

5. Descartes to Marquess of Newcastle, 23 November 1646, and to More, 5 February 1649, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, 3 vols., vol. 3, The Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 302–4, 565–66.

6. Descartes, The Seventh Set of Objections with the Author’s Replies, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 382. Even so, Descartes sometimes teetered on the brink of discussing self-concepts developmentally, particularly in distinguishing between the consciousness of infants and adults. For instance, in a letter to Arnauld, written seven years after the Meditations, Descartes made a distinction between “direct and reflective thoughts.” As an example of the former, he cites “the first and simple thoughts of infants,” such as “the pleasure they feel when nourished by sweet blood.” On the other hand, he continued, “when an adult feels something, and simultaneously perceives that he has not felt it before,” we should call this “second perception reflection” and attribute it “to the intellect alone, in spite of its being so linked to sensation that the two occur together and appear to be indistinguishable from each other” (The Philosophical Writings, 3:357).

7. See, for instance, the 1643 correspondence between Descartes and Elisabeth of Bohemia, in John J. Blom, trans. and ed., Descartes: His Moral Philosophy and Psychology (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 107–14.

8. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: Sixth Meditation, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2:56.

9. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: Second Meditation, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, ed. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2:20.

10. Although officially Descartes subscribed to a doctrine of personal immortality, how personal it was is open to question. He held, for instance, that after bodily death people will continue to possess “intellectual memories” but they will cease to possess “corporeal memories.” In a letter of 1642 to the bereaved Huygens, Descartes said that after death people will persist in “a sweeter and more tranquil life” than they enjoyed on earth and “shall still remember the past,” for they “have, in my view, an intellectual memory which is certainly independent of the body.” But Descartes does not further explain how, in his view, such intellectual memories of particulars are possible (Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, 3:216); quoted in J. Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces : Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); see also Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, 1:42, 1:106–7, quoted in M. Bobro, “Prudence and the Concern to Survive in Leibniz’s Doctrine of Immortality,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 15 (1998): 306.

11. In favor of the first answer, Hobbes said that “it is pleaded that a lump of wax, whether it be spherical or cubical, is the same wax, because the same matter.” In favor of the second, “that when a man is grown from an infant to an old man, though his matter be changed, yet he is still the same numerical man,” in virtue of having retained the same “form.” And, in favor of the third, that when something acquires a “new accident,” that is, a new property, “a new name is commonly imposed on the thing.”

Hobbes then raised for each proposal what he took to be a decisive objection. On what might be called the same-matter proposal, “he that sins, and he that is punished, should not be the same man, by reason of the perpetual flux and change of man’s body.” On the same-form proposal, “two bodies [with the same form] existing both at once, would be one and the same numerical body”—for instance, if in continually repairing the ship of Theseus by replacing old planks with new ones, one saved the old planks and then eventually made out of them a ship that was identical in form to the other, then the ship reconstructed out of the original planks “without doubt, had also been the same numerical ship with that which was in the beginning; and so there would have been two ships numerically the same, which is absurd.” On the third proposal, all it would take for something to change into something else is its acquisition of a new property, so “nothing would be the same it was; so that a man standing would not be the same with that which he was sitting; nor the water, which is in the vessel, the same with that which is poured out of it.” Quotes here and in next paragraph are from Thomas Hobbes, “De Corpore,” also known as Elements of Philosophy, 2.11, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. W. Molesworth, vol. 1 (London: J. Bohn, 1839), 135. We profited in our account of Hobbes’s views from William Uzgalis’s excellent World Congress of Philosophy paper, “Paideia and Identity: Meditations on Hobbes and Locke,” available at http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Mode/ModeUzga.htm.

12. In distinguishing here between a human and its body, Hobbes was apparently assuming, first, that a human’s body simply consists of the matter of which it’s composed and, second, that its persistence conditions are the same as a randomly arranged collection of matter, such as a pile of sand. In the case of the sand pile, change one grain, one might say (and Locke later did say), and one has a different pile. In the case of the human body, change one property, and one has a different human body. So, on Hobbes’s rather implausible view, while a human may last for quite a while, his body will not.

14. Spinoza, Ethics, 5.23, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 607.

15. In his discussion of the case of a Spanish poet of whom he had heard who suffered from amnesia, Spinoza seems to commit himself to the view that the human body cannot persist without memory. One would have thought that while memory might be required for an individual mind to persist, it would not be required for an individual body to persist. Ethics, 4.39.

17. Spinoza, Ethics, 4.67, trans. W. H. White, rev. A. H. Sterling, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 31 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 444.

18. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), in Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 65.

20. Leibniz, letter to Arnauld, May 1686, in Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 75.

22. Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1765), trans. A. G. Langley (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 255–56.

23. See, for instance, Roderick Chisholm, “Identity Through Possible Worlds: Some Questions,” Noûs 1 (1967): 1–8; reprinted in The Possible and the Actual, ed. Michael J. Loux (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 80–87; Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” in Language, Mind, and Knowledge, ed. K. Gunderson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), 131–93; Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); and James Ballie, “Personal Identity and Mental Content,” Philosophical Psychology 10 (1997): 323–33.

1. This empiricist principle, while it might sound similar to the Aristotelian principle that all knowledge comes first through the senses, is based on different presuppositions. Unlike Aristotle, who took the objective world as a given, the empiricists followed Descartes in doubting the existence and nature of anything not immediately presented to the mind. Thus all knowledge of an external world must be inferred based on immediate states of mind. The empiricists also differed from rationalists like Descartes in holding that the mind is originally a “tabula rasa,” or blank tablet, totally devoid of original innate ideas.

2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690–94), 4.3.6, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, pbk. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 4.3.6:540–41. The citation refers to book, chapter, section, and page, and subsequent references to Locke’s Essay should be understood similarly.

6. See Michael Ayers, Locke, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1991), 2:266–67. Why did Locke think that appropriation and accountability go hand in hand? There is an admittedly speculative but still, we think, plausible reason why he might have thought this. He might have thought that, analogous to the way in which people come under the rule of their government by constituting themselves as a body politic and hence accept civil responsibility for what they do, humans become subject to ethical norms by constituting themselves as persons and hence accepting ethical responsibility for what they do. That is to say, humans, merely by virtue of being alive and, hence, by virtue of being humans, do not, as it were, accept accountability for their pasts. But humans (or persons) do accept accountability for their pasts, or at least for those parts of their pasts that they remember, when, through consciousness, they declare ownership of the various parts that collectively constitute themselves.

7. Strictly speaking, mere cohesive collections of atoms, such as lumps of gold, would be “collective substances,” while things such as oak trees, horses, and persons, would not be substances at all but, rather, particular mixed modes, that is, functional organizations of particular substances.

8. The self constituted by appropriation of one’s past, present, and also future acts, in Locke’s legal theory, became the self-possessing individual who “appropriates” and owns his own “person” as a form of property and whose labor is to be used as he wishes: “Man … hath by Nature a Power … to preserve his property, that is his Life, Liberty, and Estate”: Second Treatise on Government, sect. 87, cited by C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1962), 198; see also 200–201. It is this aspect of modern individualism that Timothy Reiss focuses on in Mirages of Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), discussed in chapter 7, note 31. The individual, in this modern view, is not, a priori, a member of society, as in the premodern view, but becomes such a member only through social contract. But in this regard it is interesting to compare Locke’s view with that of Chrysippus and other Stoics, discussed toward the end of chapter 1.

10. Samuel Clarke, The Works of Samuel Clarke, 4 vols. (1738; reprint, New York: Garland, 1978), 3:720–913.

20. See C. Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

21. R. Burthogge, An Essay Upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits (1694; New York: Garland, 1976), 264–65.

22. Alexander Pope et. al., Memoirs Of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1714), ed. C. Kerby-Miller (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966). At the time, George Berkeley was a good friend of Arbuthnot and so may well have read Scriblerus and probably at least knew of its contents. In the nineteen century, Thomas Brown, in his influential Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 2 vols. (Boston: Glazier and Co., 1828), quotes approvingly from Scriblerus, 1:118–19, 2:489–90. Denis Diderot (1713–1784) comments interestingly on different, real-life conjoined twins, which he characterized not as an example of two immaterial souls bound together, but as “an animal which had in theory two senses and two consciousnesses”: “D’Alembert’s Dream,” which was written in 1769, though published much later, in Denis Diderot, Dialogues, trans. F. Birrell (New York: Capricorn Books, 1969), 78.

23. For instance, Thomas Brown, Reid’s leading successor early in the nineteenth century and an important influence on James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and William James, wrote, “Although the constant state of flux of the corporeal particles furnishes no argument against the identity of the principle which feels and thinks, if feeling and thought be states of a substance, that is, essentially distinct from these changing particles, the unity and identity of this principle, amid all the corpuscular changes,—if it can truly be proved to be identical,—furnishes a very strong argument, in disproof of those systems which consider thought and feeling as the result of material organization. Indeed, the attempts which have been seriously made by materialists to obviate this difficulty, involve, in every respect, as much absurdity, though certainly not so much pleasantry, at least not so much intentional pleasantry, as the demonstrations which the Society of Freethinkers communicated to Martinus Scriblerus…. The arguments which they are represented as urging in this admirable letter, ludicrous as they may seem, are truly as strong, at least, as those of which they are the parody; and, indeed, in this case, where both are so like, a very little occasional change of expression is all which is necessary to convert the grave ratiocination into the parody, and the parody into the grave ratiocination” (Brown, Lectures, 1:118–9). William James quotes from Brown’s remarks about Scriblerus in “The Consciousness of Self,” in Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (1890; reprint, New York: Henry Holt, 1918), 1:372.

24. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736; London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), 86.

30. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888).

31. Another, perhaps more charitable, way of understanding Hume’s division of labor in the Treatise is that in book 1 he is studying reason and what reason can discover. In doing so, he isolates reason from the rest of our mental capacities. It is seen to self-destruct. In book 2, on the other hand, he introduces consideration of the passions. Here there are no pretensions that need to be redressed. Instead, Hume turns to more constructive projects, such as providing a social account of the self.

34. In and of itself, Hume suggested, our supposing that objects persist is not so bad. But “in order to justify to ourselves this absurdity,” we make up a story, often one in which the principle character is the notion of substance; that is, we invent the fictions of “soul, and self, and substance to disguise the variation” in our perceptions. When, as in the case of “plants and vegetables,” we cannot fool ourselves into believing that the persistence of an underlying substance accounts for the persistence of the organism, we invent an equally “unknown and mysterious” surrogate—presumably, “life”—to connect the successive and different perceptions (ibid., 254–55).

41. David Hume, “Essay on the Immortality of the Soul” (1755/1783), in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1854), 4:547–48.

42. “For when we attribute identity, in an improper sense, to variable or interrupted objects, our mistake is not confin’d to the expression but is commonly attended with a fiction, either of something invariable and uninterrupted, or of something mysterious and inexplicable, or at least with a propensity to such fictions.” And further: “The identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetable and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon like objects” (ibid., 255, 259).

43. Thomas Reid, Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), in Philosophical Works of Thomas Reid, ed. W. Hamilton (1895; reprint, Hildesheim: George Olms, n.d.), 1:444.

44. Although Reid assumed that the need for substance is an argument for immaterial substance, his argument actually, so far as it goes, shows at most only the need for substance of some sort. In any case, Reid, the immaterialist about the mind, here criticized Hume, whom Reid regarded as an immaterialist about everything, for not being able to explain, on immaterialist grounds, the difference between impressions and ideas. This is one of the few places in Reid’s published work where his metaphysics of the soul may have made a substantive difference to the scientific account he was trying to develop.

45. Reid, Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, chapter 6, “Of Memory.” Although Reid is famous for this criticism of Locke, he is thought to have got it from Bishop George Berkeley. Actually, he got it from George Campbell, although Berkeley had come up with a similar criticism earlier; see J. C. Stewart-Robertson, “Thomas Reid and Pneumatology,” in The Philosophy of Thomas Reid, ed. M. Dalgarno and E. Matthews (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 397. But even Berkeley was not the first. Henry Grove had come up with it earlier, though he did not publish it. For more details, see R. Martin and J. Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2000), 70–73.

47. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), 2 vols., reprint, intro. T. L. Huguelet, 1 vol. (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1966), 1:511–12.

49. Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, and the Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777; reprint, New York: Garland, 1976), 163.

52. This idea was not key in the context of his own theory. Following Isaac Watts, he thought that some material core of self persists.

53. Thomas Cooper, Tracts, Ethical, Theological, and Political, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1789). See John Barresi and Raymond Martin, “Self-Concern from Priestley to Hazlitt,” The British Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (2003): 499–507; see also Udo Thiel, Lockes Theorie der personalen Identität (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1983), 196–97, and Thiel, ed., Philosophical Writings of Thomas Cooper (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000).

57. Thomas Belsham, Elements of the Philosophy of Mind, and of Moral Philosophy (London: J. Johnson, 1801), 162–63.

58. William Hazlitt, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action and some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius (1805), reprint, intro. J. R. Nabholtz (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969).

61. “[Imagination] must carry me out of myself into the feeling of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being and interested in it. I could not love myself, if I were not capable of loving others. Self-love, used in this sense, is in its fundamental principle the same with disinterested benevolence” (ibid., 3).

66. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762), trans. Barbara Foxley, intro P. D. Jimack (London: Dent, 1974), book 1. See also Jean A. Perkins, The Concept of the Self in the French Enlightenment (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1969), 95.

1. Kant’s view of the noumenal and phenomenal self combines the Cartesian project of positing the self as a knower of the world that is not itself an object within the world with the empiricist project of positing a self as just one of many objects within the world.

2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781; rev., 1787), ed. and trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), A364n:342.

4. For an accessible explanation of this difficult idea, see Simon Blackburn, Think (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 138–40.

6. Husserl, to take another example, retained Kant’s notion of the transcendental ego, but with two differences. He attributed metaphysical reality to it, and he seemed to want to claim that there is a different transcendental ego corresponding to each different person. How Husserl could have known this is a mystery.

7. Gary Hatfield, “Remaking the Science of Mind: Psychology as Natural Science,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 211.

8. The anecdotes are related in Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe, trans. James Gutmann, Paul Kristeller, and John Randall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1945), 1.

9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The First Walk,” in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 27.

12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses (1755), trans. R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 195.

13. Friedrich von Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German, and Italian, Harvard Classics 32 (New York: Collier, c. 1910), letter 6.

14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1:118–9.

16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, 6 vols., ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 2:1197.

17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Opus Maximum: Collected Works, 16 vols., ed. Thomas McFarland with Nicholas Halmi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), fragment 2 ff., 15:121.

20. Johann Fichte, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre), Nova Methodo (1796–99), ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 112.

24. Quoted in translation in Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 155.

25. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 130.

27. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818, 1844, 1859) trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966).

28. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Immortality: A Dialogue,” in Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays, trans. T. Bailey Saunders, 4th ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893; reprint, St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1976), 53–58; this is the source of subsequent quotations.

29. Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard B. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13.

31. Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Ecco Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888), in The Philosophy of Neitzsche, ed. Geoffrey Clive, trans. A.M. Ludovici (New York: New American Library, 1965), 49.

32. Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmmondworth: Penguin, 1979), 75.

33. Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 267–68.

34. Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), note 492. This book of Nietzsche’s was selectively edited and altered by his sister after his death and is widely regarded as corrupt. However, it seems likely that the passages that we quote, which have nothing to do with politics or race, accurately represent his views.

45. Wilhelm Dilthey, The Human World: Introduction to a Philosophy of Life, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, cited in Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 145.

46. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Scriften, 18 vols. (Stuttgart: B. G. Trubner, 1914–77), 4:59; quoted by the translator in Michael Ermarth, William Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 319–20.

48. Josiah Royce, “Some Observations on the Anomalies of Self-Consciousness,” pp. 169–97 in Studies of Good and Evil (1898; Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1964), 169.

49. Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual: Second Series: Nature, Man, and the Moral Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901–13), 263.

51. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893, 1897; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 72.

1. In Newton’s theory, gravitational attraction is action at a distance, so his theory is not straightforwardly mechanistic. Nevertheless, the overwhelming impression that his theories left on most thinkers is that because of the simplicity and regularity of nature that his theories revealed, the universe as a whole is genuinely clocklike.

2. See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), part 2.

3. Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Man the Machine (1748), trans. Gertrude Bussey (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1912).

4. Pierre Cabanis, Relations of the Physical and the Moral in Man (1802), ed. George Mora, trans. Margaret Duggan Saidi (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1981).

5. By such as A. L. Wigan (fl. 1844), Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens (1794–1867), Paul Broca (1824–1880), John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911), and David Ferrier (1843–1928). Thomas Willis in the seventeenth century had proposed localization, but this view lost ground in the eighteenth century, only to reappear in the nineteenth.

6. J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann, The Medical Works of Hippocrates (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950), 183.

7. As quoted in Joseph E. Bogen, “Mental Duality in the Anatomically Intact Cerebrum,” paper presented as the Presidential Address to the Los Angeles Society of Neurology and Psychiatry, January 1983; published, in part, as “Partial Hemispheric Independence with Neocommisures Intact,” in Brain Circuits and Functions of Mind, ed. C. Trevarthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 215–30.

8. Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain :A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 7–10.

9. Other advances included the development by Charles Bell (1774–1842) of new ways of distinguishing between sensory and motor nerves; Johannes Müller’s (1801–1858) doctrine of specific nerve energies that systematized the epistemological role of the nervous system as intermediary between mind and world; and the beginnings of a sensory phenomenology of vision and of touch. In Müller’s view, for instance, the doctrine of specific nerve energies involved two principles: that the mind is directly aware not of objects in the physical world but of states of the nervous system, which serve as intermediaries between the world and the mind; and that the qualities of the sensory nerves of which the mind receives knowledge in sensation are specific to the various senses, the nerve of vision being normally as insensible to sound as the nerve of hearing is to light.

10. We are talking here of serious empirical research on brain physiology. Phrenology did come under popular notice, but by the time it did, interpreting “bumps on the head” as reflecting underlying brain functions had become pseudoscience, not science.

11. Charles Darwin, Autobiography, in Charles Darwin, His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1892), 40.

12. John Tyndall, Fragments of Science for Unscientific People: A Series of Detached Essays, Lectures, and Reviews. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871) pp. 119-120.

13. Some of the material in this and the next section has been adapted from Robert H. Wozniak, Mind and Body: René Descartes to William James http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/Table.html.

14. Puységur’s techniques and Mesmer’s explanations were promulgated in the United States by the Frenchman C. P. de Saint Sauveur.

15. James Braid, Neurypnology; or, the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism (London: John Churchill, 1843), 94.

16. Braid may not have been the first to have done this. The Scottish physician James Esdaile (1808–1859) published a book three years after Braid’s in which he claimed to have performed over 3,000 operations in Calcutta using only hypnosis as an anesthetic.

17. Theodule Ribot, Diseases of Personality (1891), reprint, in Significant Contributions to the History of Psychology, 1750–1920, Series C: Medical Psychology: T. A. Ribot, ed. D. N. Robinson, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: University Publications of America, 1997), 1.

21. In his youth, Comte was influenced by the ideologues, a group of radical French thinkers that included Cabanis and Condorcet (1743–1794), author of Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. In their work, Comte found an optimistic, developmental philosophy of history. He was also influenced by the utopian socialist Claude Saint-Simon (1760–1825), who dreamt of a society led by scientists and industrialists in which there would be a division of labor that would ensure social harmony.

22. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

23. Auguste Comte, The Postive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 3 vols., trans. and compiled by Harriet Martineau (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896), 2:100–101.

24. Theses on Feuerbach, VI, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 14.

25. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 42.

26. Karl Marx, preface to Critique of Political Economy, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 1:503.

27. Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 2 vols. (Boston: Glazier & Co., 1828), 1:133.

28. James Mill, Analysis of the Human Mind, 2 vols., ed. A. Bain, A. Findlater, and G. Grote (London: Longman’s Green Reader and Dyer, 1869), 2:168.

29. Brown and James Mill were more psychological than philosophical or biological in their theories, and for that reason, their thinking has been appreciated subsequently more by nineteenth-century psychologists than by philosophers. For instance, in Principles of Psychology William James applauded Brown’s discussions of connectedness in the stream of consciousness. Likewise, psychologists at the end of the century regarded James Mill’s associative psychology as an important advance on Hartley’s approach. By contrast, they tended to consider John Stuart Mill’s psychology, which has been greatly appreciated by twentieth-century analytical philosophers, as too philosophical.

30. J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (1866; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 64.

33. J. S. Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865; London: Longman’s, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1878), 262–63; William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (1890; reprint, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1918), 1:358.

36. H. Sidgwick The Methods of Ethics (1874), 7th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1907), 162, 418.

37. Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will, 3rd ed. (New York: Appleton and Co., 1876), 203–4.

38. James M. Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race (New York: Macmillan, 1894), 2–4.

39. James M. Baldwin, History of Psychology: A Sketch and an Interpretation, 2 vols., (London: Watts & Co., 1913), 2:108–9.

1. Quoted from Martin Kusch, Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1995), 191.

2. During the first half of the century, both phenomenology and analytic philosophy abandoned foundationalism in epistemology. Phenomenologists abandoned it in making the transition from Husserl to Heidegger, who looked back over Husserl’s head to Nietzsche. Analytic philosophers began making the change somewhat later.

3. W. V. O. Quine’s extraordinarily influential paper, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” The Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20–43, marked a turning point in analytic philosophy. Those who accepted Quine’s argument, which included quite a few analytic philosophers, abandoned the logical-positivist idea that the a priori analysis of concepts is the main task of philosophy.

4. Husserl, who began as a student of Franz Brentano (1838–1917), was subsequently influenced by Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) to move away from “psychologism” toward a more logical style of analysis.

6. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. and intro. David Carr (1954; Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 3B.60:212. In section 3B.62:216, Husserl tried to distill a basis for the “I” by tracing this activity of self-appropriation back to those structures of experience on which the very activity of being aware of things and their meanings depends. He asked whether souls are spatial and concluded that in some sense they must be since “all objects in the world are in essence ‘embodied,’ and for that very reason all ‘take part’ in the space-time of bodies”; “this applies to spiritual objects of every sort,” including souls.

10. Heidegger does not try to prove the existence of others. Instead, he takes himself to have demonstrated, in three ways, that others are among the necessary conditions of human existence. First, since everything that a human does refers to others in some fashion, others are always implicated in one’s actions; even when one is alone, one experiences the absence of others. Second, typically one conceptualizes oneself in an “impersonal” way—as a generalized or impersonal other—that derives from one’s culture. Finally, one’s mode of existence as authentic or inauthentic is influenced by others. One is drawn toward authenticity in the presence of authentic others and toward inauthenticity in the presence of inauthentic others.

11. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 2.3.64:368.

14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness (1936), trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), 104.

16. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), 200.

18. Russell’s lectures bear titles like, “Facts and Propositions,” “Particulars, Predicates, and Relations,” and “The Theory of Types and Symbolism.”

19. Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge, ed. R. C. Marsh (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1956), 277.

20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. D. Pears and B. McGuiness (London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1961), 5.6:56, 5.63:57, 5.632:57, 6.4311:72.

22. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, 1946), 125–26.

23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, trans G. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).

27. John Austin, “Other Minds,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary 20 (1946). Reprint, in Classics of Analytic Philosophy, ed. Robert Ammerman (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 374.

28. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).

29. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, A Short History of Philosophy (New York: Oxford, 1996), 286. Although on this occasion Ryle was sarcastic, earlier he had written a respectful review of Heidegger’s Being and Time, and he shared Heidegger’s insistence on the primacy of knowing how over knowing that.

30. May had studied briefly with Adler, after Adler had broken with Freud, and with Paul Tillich (1886–1965), the existentialist theologian. Then, during a three-year period when May was gravely ill and faced the possibility of death, he read Kierkegaard. Subsequently, he studied psychoanalysis with Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949) and Erich Fromm (1900–1980).

31. Rollo May, “The Origins and Significance of the Existential Movement in Psychology,” in Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, ed. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger (New York: Basic Books, 1958), 7.

32. Maslow studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where he worked with Harry Harlow, who is famous for his studies of the social-attachment behavior of baby rhesus monkeys. Later, while teaching at Brooklyn College, he came into contact with European intellectuals who were immigrating to the United States, including Adler, Fromm, and Karen Horney. Later still, he met Kurt Goldstein, who introduced him to the idea of self-actualization. It was then that Maslow began his crusade for a humanistic psychology.

33. We profited in organizing our account of Mead from the excellent summary (author unknown) of Mead’s views in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/m/mead.htm#top.

34. G. H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (1934), ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 135.

43. Lev Vygotsky, Thinking and Speech (1934), 293; quoted and trans. in Ivana Markova, “The Development of Self-Consciousness: Baldwin, Mead, and Vygotsky,” in Reconsidering Psychology: Perspectives from Continental Philosophy, ed. J. Faulconer and R. Williams (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1990), 151–74.

44. L. Vygotsky, “Consciousness as a Problem in the Psychology of Behavior,” Soviet Psychology 17 (1979): 29.

45. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 3–4.

46. Max Horkheimer, Die Juden in Europa (1939), in Wirtschaft, Recht und Staat im Nationalsozialismus. Analysen des Instituts für Sozialforschung 1939–1942, ed. H. Dubiel and A. Söllner (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 33.

1. See, for instance, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1958), ed. Allen Lane, trans. Clair Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); and Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957; Paris: Seuil, 1970).

3. In Foucault’s own words, “the death of the subject, of the Subject in capital letters, of the subject as origin and foundation of Knowledge, of Liberty, of Language and History”: Michel Foucault, “The Birth of a World,” interview with Jean-Michel Palmier, Le Monde, 3 May 1969, reprint, in Foucault Live, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth and J. Johnson (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 61. Recounted in Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger and Foucault on the Subject, Agency, and Practices,” an unpublished MS (2002) that we drew upon in interpreting Foucault.

4. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (1969), in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. Josué V. Harari (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 118, 102.

6. Quoted by Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1980), 20.

8. Michel Foucault, “The Return of Morality,” in Foucault Live, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth and J. Johnson (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 466. More precisely, he said that before The Care of the Self (1984), the final volume of his History of Sexuality, he had tried to do this.

9. Michel Foucault, “The Concern for Truth,” in Foucault Live, ed. S. Lotringer, trans. L. Hochroth and J. Johnson (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 458.

10. Cited by Paul Rabinow in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1994), xxxix.

11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.

12. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference (1970), trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–79.

13. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 39.

14. Derrida, “Différance” (1968), in Margins of Philosophy, ed. J. Derrida, trans. David Allison (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–27.

16. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in Three Negro Classics, ed. and intro. John Hope Franklin (Chicago: Avon, 1965), 213, 215.

17. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 36.

18. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 16. Recognizing the positionality of his own view, Fanon remarked, “Since I was born in the Antilles, my observations and my conclusions are valid only for the Antilles—at least concerning the black man at home.”

22. Amina Mama, Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender, and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1995), 48.

23. There are, of course, many other important theorists of ethnicity and race that deserve to be mentioned, among them: Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Frank Chin, Hortense Spillers, Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, Cornell West, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

24. Whereas postmodernism has nourished many feminist theories of the self, its challenge to the idea of a stable self and to the validity of the category woman has also encouraged the view that there is nothing that all women have in common and, hence, brought into question whether there is anything for feminism to be about. In response to this challenge, Linda Alcoff has construed femininity as “positionality,” which she says has two dimensions: a social context that deprives women of power and mobility, and a political point of departure from which women can affirm their right to take charge of their own identities. Alcoff, “A Philosophical Dialogue with ‘Dialogue with the Other,’” Gender-Nature-Culture (1994): 5–22. Sally Haslanger, on the other hand, has advocated a politicized, “critical analytical” approach to gender. In her view, the principal task for feminist theory is to provide an analysis of gender not in terms of the experience of sexed embodiment but in terms of a “pattern of social relations that constitute the social classes of men as dominant and women as subordinate.” She advocates that women adopt whatever conception of gender best serves their emancipatory aims; see Haslanger, “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?” Nous 34, no. 1 (March 2000): 31–55. We have been aided in this section by Diana Meyers, “Feminist Perspectives on the Self,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), which can be found at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-self.

26. Sandra Bartky, “Sympathy and Solidarity: On a Tightrope with Scheler,” in Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. Diana Meyers (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 177.

29. N. Humphrey, “The Social Function of Intellect,” in Growing Points in Ethology, ed. P. P. G. Bateson and R. Hinde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 303–17, reprint, in Humphrey, Consciousness Regained: Chapters in the Development of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

30. D. Premack and G. Woodruff, “Do Chimpanzees Have a Theory of Mind?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1978): 516–26.

31. Some have argued that even newborns mimic adults, but it is controversial whether the phenomena to which they point is genuine mimicry.

32. M. L. Hoffman, “Empathy, Its Development and Prosocial Implications,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, ed. C. B. Keasey, vol. 25, Social Cognitive Development (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977).

33. H. Wimmer and J. Perner, “Beliefs About Beliefs: Representations and Constraining Function of Wrong Beliefs in Young Children’s Understanding of Deception,” Cognition 13 (1983): 103–28.

34. Henry A. Murray, Explorations in Personality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 49.

35. D. McAdams, “What Do We Know When We Know a Person?” Journal of Personality 63 (1995): 365–95; D. McAdams, “The Case for Unity in the (Post) Modern Self: A Modest Proposal,” in Self and Identity: Fundamental Issues, ed. R. Ashmore and L. Jussim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 46–78.

36. K. J. Gergen and M. M. Gergen, “Narrative and the Self as Relationship,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 21 (1988): 18.

37. H. Hermans, T. Rijks, and H. Kempen, “Imaginal Dialogues in the Self: Theory and Method,” Journal of Personality 61 (1993): 210.

39. Yet, in apparent contradiction to this general principle, they concede that even this “Self” can sometimes be dominated by subselves, so that it might be better to conceive the Self as “in the middle of a highly dynamic field of criss-cross dialogical relationships among possible positions, subjected to influences from all sides”: H. Hermans and H. Kempen, The Dialogical Self: Meaning as Movement (New York: Academic Press, 1993), 98.

40. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 216–17.

42. See Daniel Dennett, “The Origin of Selves,” Cogito 1 (1989): 163–73; and Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel Dennett, “Speaking for Ourselves: An Assessment of Multiple Personality Disorder,” Raritan 9 (1989): 68–98. Both essays are reprinted in D. Kolak and R. Martin, eds., Self and Identity (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 144–61, 355–63. See also the development of these earlier ideas in Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1991).

43. For discussion of both the medical and philosophical aspects of these cases, see R. Sperry, “Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness,” American Psychologist 23 (1968): 723–33; R. Puccetti, “Two Brains, Two Minds? Wigan’s Theory of Mental Duality,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (1989): 137–44; T. Nagel, “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and D. Parfit, “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons,” in Mindwaves, ed. C. Blakemore and S. Greenfield (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). All four of these essays are reprinted in D. Kolak and R. Martin, eds. Self and Identity (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 55–88.

44. See Michael Gazzaniga, The Mind’s Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

45. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York : G. P. Putnam, 1994).

46. Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens : Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).

47. Fission examples had been discussed earlier in the twentieth century, in A. N. Prior, “Opposite Number,” Review of Metaphysics 11 (1957–58): 196–201; Prior, “Time, Existence, and Identity,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57 (1965–66): 183–92; J. Bennett, “The Simplicity of the Soul,” Journal of Philosophy 44 (1967): 648–60; R. Chisholm and S. Shoemaker, “Identity,” in Perception and Personal Identity: Proceedings of the 1967 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy, ed. Norman Care and Robert H. Grimm (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1967).

48. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 222.

51. For more on this example, see Raymond Martin, Self-Concern: An Experiential Approach to What Matters in Survival (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80–85.

54. Derek Parfit’s views may be found mainly in “Personal Identity,” Philosophical Review 80 (1971): 3–27, and in Reasons and Persons. David Lewis’s explanation and defense of the four-dimensional view of persons is in his “Survival and Identity,” in The Identities of Persons, ed. Amelie Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 17–40; and in Lewis, “Postscript to ‘Survival and Identity,’” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Other important work since 1970 that would have been discussed in a more complete survey includes papers by Sydney Shoemaker, Robert Nozick, John Perry, Peter Unger, Ernest Sosa, and Thomas Nagel. Copies of important papers by these and other authors can be found in Kolak and Martin, eds., Self and Identity, and Raymond Martin and John Barresi, eds., Personal Identity (New York: Blackwell, 2002).

1. What Socrates means by continually dying is continually removing oneself in thought from as many bodily distractions as possible so that mentally one communes only with what is ideal and immaterial—the eternal verities, if you will.

2. Yet, in Socrates’ time, and no doubt earlier, people must often have been afraid of death, or else Epicurus and other philosophers would not have spent so much time encouraging people to overcome their fears. In the late sixteenth century, Montaigne, too, exhorted people to overcome their fear of death:

Let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.… We do not know where death awaits us; so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

(Michel de Montaigne, “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die,” in The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech ([New York: Penguin, 1993]), book 1, essay 20, 96)

The point of this seems to be that to live freely, we must free ourselves of the fear of death, which fear is all but universal. Recall Spinoza’s famous pronouncement, “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death.” See chapter 8, note 18.

4. It was, of course, also deeply consequential for the question of how to live a good life.

5. It is an interesting question when organisms first developed a sense of themselves as beings that are distinct from others and when they first developed a sense of themselves as beings that persist over time. Some claim that every biological creature has a sense of itself as a being distinct from others. The basis for this suggestion is that in order to survive, living things have to be sensitive to their own boundaries, or else when they go to eat something they might eat themselves. See Daniel Dennett, “The Origin of Selves,” Cogito 1 (1989): 163–73, reprint, in Self and Identity : Contemporary Philosophical Issues, ed. D. Kolak and R. Martin (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 355–64.

6. Some eighteenth-century, empirically minded philosophers, such as Thomas Reid, tried to retain for the soul a place in scientific theory, often with an implicit suggestion that the notion of soul that they employed scientifically is the very same notion as the one that they and others employed religiously. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, such pretentious attempts to link science and religion were abandoned.

7. There were exceptions. Locke, for instance, tended to use self and person more or less interchangeably in what he took to be his empirically grounded account of personal identity over time. Hume, by contrast, thought of the self as a bundle of perceptions and tried sometimes to make use of this more empirically respectable notion of self in his scientific thoughts. But the bundle idea never actually does much work in Hume’s scientific theories, such as in his account of the origin of sympathy.

8. William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (1890; reprint, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1918), 1:294–401. After James, it is not obvious that theories of the self any longer have a unified object of study, that is, that there is a self that is sufficiently cohesive that it can be studied by just one disciplinary approach or as a unified thing. As we have seen, theorists continued to talk about the self at least until World War II as if it were cohesive. However, when the notion of the self did clearly seem to be functioning as a scientifically useful explanatory notion, often the theories in which it plays this role, such as psychoanalytic theory and existential or humanistic psychology, are ones that, from the perspective of many in our own times, are on the margins of science.

9. Hendericus Stam, in “The Dialogical Self, Meaning, and Theory: Making the Subject,” paper presented at the First International Conference on the Dialogical Self, Nijmegen, Netherlands, June 2000, suggested that in psychological research the self as a unitary entity had all but been replaced by the study of hyphenated self-functions.

10. Ulrich Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge,” Philosophical Psychology 1 (1988): 37–59, reprint, in Self and Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues, ed. D. Kolak and R. Martin (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 386–406.

11. By taking a synoptic view, Neisser seems to have freed psychologists to pursue their studies of one or the other of his sources of self-knowledge with a clearer conscience and less likelihood of getting confused. See, for instance, Chris Moore and Karen Lemmon, eds., The Self in Time: Developmental Issues (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2000).

13. Abraham Tucker, who wrote late in the eighteenth century, is an excellent example. See R. Martin and J. Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2000), chap. 5.

14. Still, some philosophers continue to insist on something like the unity of the self. See, for instance, Peter Unger, Identity, Consciousness, and Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), chap. 6. But see Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chap. 6.

15. In a recent interview, Derek Parfit remarked that what interests him most “are those metaphysical questions,” such as personal identity, free will, and the passage of time, “whose answers seem to be relevant—or to make a difference—to what we have reason to care about or to do, and to our moral beliefs”; Andrew Pyle, ed., Key Philosophers in Conversation: The Cogito Interviews (London: Routledge, 1999), 180.

16. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), traces the history of the self with the aim of answering questions of this sort.

17. See, for instance, Robert Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 110.