The Oxford Handbook of the SelfShaun Gallagher Research on the topic of self has increased significantly in recent years across a number of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, psychopathology, and neuroscience. The Oxford Handbook of the Self is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that address questions in all of these areas. In philosophy and some areas of cognitive science, the emphasis on embodied cognition has fostered a renewed interest in rethinking personal identity, mind-body dualism, and overly Cartesian conceptions of self. Poststructuralist deconstructions of traditional metaphysical conceptions of subjectivity have led to debates about whether there are any grounds (moral if not metaphysical) for reconstructing the notion of self. Questions about whether selves actually exist or have an illusory status have been raised from perspectives as diverse as neuroscience, Buddhism, and narrative theory. With respect to self-agency, similar questions arise in experimental psychology. In addition, advances in developmental psychology have pushed to the forefront questions about the ontogenetic origin of self-experience, while studies of psychopathology suggest that concepts like self and agency are central to explaining important aspects of pathological experience. These and other issues motivate questions about how we understand, not only "the self", but also how we understand ourselves in social and cultural contexts. |
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action activity Albahari animals argued autism behavior believe biological bodily awareness body ownership brain Buddhist Cambridge Cartesian Cashinahua causal chimpanzees claim cognitive Cognitive Sciences conception consciousness constituted cortex Descartes developmental dialogical Disorders distinction embodied emotions entities example existence experienced experiential fact feeling first-person perspective function human Husserl idea identify implementation intentions individual intentional intentional object involved judgments kind lives Lyotard metaphysical mind minimal mirror moral responsibility multiplicity multisensory integration narrative neural NeuroImage Neuroscience notion object one’s one’s body oneself ontological Oxford University Press perception personal identity perspectival phenomenal phenomenology Philosophical physical position possible proprioceptive psychological question Reductionism Reductionists reference relation role rubber hand Schizophrenia seems self-awareness self-consciousness self-control self-informative self-recognition selfhood sensations sense of agency social spatial Strawson structure studies subject of experience suggests temporal theory things thought tion Tsakiris unified unity visual