ABSTRACT
The self is typically conceived to be prior to experience and to have a special relation to its own experiences which guarantees its privileged access to them. This relation also individuates one person’s act of thinking from another’s and ties each mental act to one single person. The monad view of the self also has important implications. It provides the primary justification for most forms of individualism. Individual persons are regarded as atomic units from which society is constructed, and they are endowed with rights which cannot be abrogated without consent. Some Anglo-American philosophers have also marshalled serious objections to the Cartesian picture. In The Concept of Mind Gilbert Ryle mounts an explicit attack on the Cartesian picture – the metaphor of an inner theater of occult processes or the myth of the ghost in the machine.
