This lively book offers a wide-ranging study of Greek notions of mind and human selfhood from Homer through Plotinus. A. A. Long anchors his discussion in questions of recurrent and universal interest. What happens to us when we die? How is the mind or soul related to the body? Are we responsible for our own happiness? Can we achieve autonomy? Long asks when and how these questions emerged in ancient Greece, and shows that Greek thinkers’ modeling of the mind gave us metaphors that we still live by, such as the rule of reason or enslavement to passion. He also interrogates the less familiar Greek notion of the intellect’s divinity, and asks what that might mean for us.

Because Plato’s dialogues articulate these themes more sharply and influentially than works by any other Greek thinker, Plato receives the most sustained treatment in this account. But at the same time, Long asks whether Plato’s explanation of the mind and human behavior is more convincing for modern readers than that contained in the older Homeric poems. Turning to later ancient philosophy, especially Stoicism, Long concludes with an exploration of Epictetus’s injunction to live life by making correct use of one’s mental impressions.

An authoritative treatment of Greek modes of self-understanding, Greek Models of Mind and Self demonstrates how ancient thinkers grappled with what is closest to us and yet still most mysterious—our own essence as singular human selves—and how the study of Greek thought can enlarge and enrich our experience.

Frequently cited and just as often disputed, Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) and “The First Person” (1975) are touchstones of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Though the arguments Anscombe advances in these papers are familiar to philosophers, their significance remains widely misunderstood, says James Doyle.

No Morality, No Self offers a fresh interpretation of Anscombe’s still-controversial theses about ethical reasoning and individual identity, specifically, her argument that the term “moral” (as it occurs in such contexts as “moral obligation”) is literally meaningless, and that “I” does not refer to some special entity called a “self”—a pair of claims that philosophers have responded to with deep skepticism. However unsettling Anscombe’s conclusions may be, Doyle shows the underlying seriousness of the British philosopher’s reasoning, exposing with clarity and concision how the counterarguments of Anscombe’s detractors are based on a flawed or incomplete understanding of her ideas.

Doyle zeroes in on the central conundrum Anscombe posed to the referentialist school: namely, that it is impossible to give a noncircular explanation of how “I” refers to the person who utters it. He shows where the refutations of philosophers including Lucy O’Brien, Gareth Evans, and Ian Rumfitt fall short, and throws light on why “I” developed features that make it look as if it functions as a referring expression. Reconciling seemingly incompatible points of view, Doyle argues that “I” does refer to a self, but not in a way anyone suspected—a surprising conclusion that is entirely à propos of Anscombe’s provocative thought.

What if you were to discover that you were not entirely you, but rather one half of a whole, that you had, in other words, a divine double? In the second and third centuries CE, this idea gripped the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean, providing a distinctive understanding of the self that has survived in various forms throughout the centuries, down to the present. Our Divine Double traces the rise of this ancient idea that each person has a divine counterpart, twin, or alter-ego, and the eventual eclipse of this idea with the rise of Christian conciliar orthodoxy.

Charles Stang marshals an array of ancient sources: from early Christianity, especially texts associated with the apostle Thomas “the twin”; from Manichaeism, a missionary religion based on the teachings of the “apostle of light” that had spread from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean; and from Neoplatonism, a name given to the renaissance of Platonism associated with the third-century philosopher Plotinus. Each of these traditions offers an understanding of the self as an irreducible unity-in-duality. To encounter one’s divine double is to embark on a path of deification that closes the gap between image and archetype, human and divine.

While the figure of the divine double receded from the history of Christianity with the rise of conciliar orthodoxy, it survives in two important discourses from late antiquity: theodicy, or the problem of evil; and Christology, the exploration of how the Incarnate Christ is both human and divine.

What is the nature of the fundamental relation we have to ourselves that makes each of us a self? To answer this question, Charles Larmore develops a systematic theory of the self, challenging the widespread view that the self’s defining relation to itself is to have an immediate knowledge of its own thoughts. On the contrary, Larmore maintains, our essential relation to ourselves is practical, as is clear when we consider the nature of belief and desire. For to believe or desire something consists in committing ourselves to thinking and acting in accord with the presumed truth of our belief or the presumed value of what we desire.

Larmore develops this conception with frequent reference to such classic authors as Montaigne, Stendhal, and Proust and by comparing it to other views of the self in contemporary philosophy. He also discusses the important ethical consequences of his theory of the self, arguing that it allows us to better grasp what it means to be ourselves and why self-understanding often involves self-creation.

Winner of the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de Philosophie, The Practices of the Self is that rare kind of lucid yet rigorous work that transcends disciplinary boundaries.

An ARTery Best Book of the Year
An Art of Manliness Best Book of the Year

In a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul.

“An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard…Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor…[A] powerful, heartfelt book.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“[Edmundson’s] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a ‘real education’ in the humanities, inspired by the goal of ‘human transformation’ and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like…[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies—and his own chosen lifestyle.”
—Mathew Reisz, Times Higher Education

“Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living.”
—Kirkus Reviews

The topic of this book is self-consciousness, which is a kind of knowledge, namely knowledge of oneself as oneself, or self-knowledge. Sebastian Rödl's thesis is that self-knowledge is not empirical; it does not spring from sensory affection. Rather, self-knowledge is knowledge from spontaneity; its object and its source are the subject's own activity, in the primary instance its acts of thinking, both theoretical and practical thinking, belief and action.

The chapters of this book cover action and belief, freedom and reason, receptive knowledge and the second person. Each of these topics deserves its own book. And yet they would all be books on self-consciousness, for self-consciousness is the principle of their respective subject matters. Contemporary theories have been badly served by failing to acknowledge this. Taking the full measure of this insight requires a major conceptual reorientation in action theory, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology, which is begun in this book. As it can be said to be the principal thought animating Kant and his Idealist successors that self-consciousness occupies this central position, the book can be read as an attempt to recover and rejuvenate the achievement of the German Idealist tradition.

In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality.

The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor’s goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.