「汝自身を知れ」は、デルフォイのアポロン神殿に刻まれていたとされる言葉ですが、私たちの自己理解は謎と逆説に満ちています。自己とは何なのか、自己であることは何を意味し、なぜ重要なのか。自己はどのような変化に耐えうるのか、耐えられないのか。自己は身体から切り離せるものか、ひとつの身体に複数の自己が存在しうるのか。環境や他の自己との関わりは、自己を構成し維持する上でどのような役割を果たすのか。本書は、自己に関する最も興味深く不可解な疑問に、哲学、心理学、精神医学、社会学、思想からの洞察を用いて考察し、自然や社会に埋め込まれた、相互作用する主体であり主体としての自己の、複雑で多次元的な図式を浮かび上がらせます。
'Know thyself' is said to have been one of the maxims carved into the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. On the face of it, this does not seem like a very difficult task. My self is with me at every moment of every day, I have access to its inner thoughts and feelings, and I am hardly liable to mistake someone else for me. At the same time, however, the self is surprisingly elusive and opaque. What, after all, is a self? Is it some kind of object? If so, what kind? If not an object, what then? Is our sense of self ultimately illusory? Something that disappears when studied too closely? Our understanding of the self is replete with puzzles and paradoxes: I cannot be anyone but who I am, and yet everyone will acknowledge that there are circumstances in which being oneself is an extremely difficult task. If I change enough, I can be said to have become a different person. I cannot get away from myself, and yet I can find and lose myself.
In this Very Short Introduction, Marya Schechtman uses insights from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and popular thought to consider some of the most compelling and puzzling questions about the self, including questions about what kind of object a self is if it is an object at all, what it means to be oneself and why it is important, what kinds of changes the self can and cannot survive, whether a self can be separated from its body, whether more than one self can exist in a single body, and what role engagement with the environment and with other selves plays in constituting and maintaining the self. These investigations yield a complex, multi-dimensional picture of the self as a subject and agent embedded in and interacting with a natural and social world.
1:What is the Self? Metaphysics
2:Becoming Someone Else
3:Being Who You Are
4:Waxing and Waning Selves
5:Divided and Distressed Selves
6:Embodied, Social Selves
References and Further Reading
ISBN : 9780198835257
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