The early modern subject
Subtitle: self-consciousness and personal identity from Descartes to Hume
By: Udo Thiel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 483
ISBN-13: 9780199542499
Subjects: European Philosophy; Self-consciousness (Awareness); Identity (Philosophical concept); History
Other titles: Self-consciousness and personal identity from Descartes to Hume
Description: "Explores the understanding of self-consciousness and personal identity - two fundamendtal features of human subjectivity - as it developed in early modern philosophy. Udo Thiel presents a critical evaluation of these features as they were conceived in the sevententh and eighteenth centuries. He explains the arguments of thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume, as well as their early critics, followers, and other philosophical contemporaries, and situates them within their historical contexts. Interest in the issues of self-consciousness and personal identity is in many ways characteristic [of] and even central to early modern thought, but Thiel argues here that this is also an interest that continues to this day, in a form still strongly influenced by the conceptual frameworks of early modern thought. In this book he attempts to broaden the scope of the treatment of these issues considerably, covering more than a hundred years of philosophical debate in France, Britain, and Germany while remaining attentive to the details of the arguments under scrutiny and discussing alternative interpretations in many cases"--Publisher's description, p. [4] of dust jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [438]-470) and index.
Table of contents: title: 1. The seventeenth-century background; title: 2. Locke's subjectivist revolution; title: 3. Problems with Locke : critique and defence; title: 4. Subjectivity and immaterialist metaphysics of the mind; title: 5. Substance, apperception, and identity : Leibniz, Wolff, and beyond; title: 6. Bundles and selves : Hume in context.