Theories of the Self

This chapter examines a number of different theories of the self explicitly set out in, or implied by, the work of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Max Stirner, Heidegger, Sartre, and R. D. Laing. Two philosophical problems are used to focus the discussion of the works of these philosophers. The problem of knowledge, exemplified by the "veil of the senses" argument, is used to examine the relation between the self and the world that is not-self, and to address the question of the spatiality of the self. In the tradition of Continental philosophy since the eighteenth century much attention has been paid to the question of selfhood. Solomon in his book Continental Philosophy Since 1750 - The Rise and Fall of the Self provides a most useful historical survey tracing the development of the notion of the self, which he says was "discovered" in the mid-eighteenth century, to what he contends is the end of the notion with structuralism and post-modernism.