Consciousness and the Self: New Essays

Description

'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.' These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry's collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on consciousness with the traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke and Hume. Experts in the field offer contrasting perspectives on matters such as the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, the notion of personhood and the epistemic access to one's own thoughts, desires or attitudes. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and others working on the central topics of consciousness and the self.

JeeLoo Liu is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author of An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: From Ancient Philosophy to Chinese Buddhism (2006). John Perry is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (2001), Identity, Personal Identity and the Self (2002) and a number of other books.

"...The main important point of this book is the capacity of the editors to put together different accounts about self-awareness that perfectly mix traditional and contemporary points of view about conscious states and the self. The diversity of thesis and conclusions included between the different chapters permits to take a panoramic look to the actual debate in philosophy of consciousness and self-awareness." --Juan J. Colomina, PhD, The University of Texas at Austin and LEMA Research Group (University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain), Metapsychology Online Reviews "...I'll lay my cards on the table right away and say that this is a good book. It's not too often that I read a collection such as this cover to cover, and I found doing so with this volume very rewarding. The book contains plenty of chewy philosophical argumentation and the, admittedly only occasional, references between papers were illuminating. There's a lot to learn, and to engage with, here.... It's a good book, with lots of careful papers and serious arguments. Anybody with even a passing interest in self-consciousness, consciousness or the self, cannot fail to learn something from its pages." --Joel Smith, University of Manchester, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews