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How Many Selves Make Me?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Stephen R. L. Clark
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Extract

Cartesian accounts of the mental make it axiomatic that consciousness is transparent: what I feel, I know I feel, however many errors I may make about its cause. ‘I’ names a simple, unextended, irreducible substance, created ex nihilo or eternally existent, and only associated with the complete, extended, dissoluble substance or pretend-substance that is ‘my’ body by divine fiat. Good moderns take it for granted that ‘we’ now realize how shifting, foggy and deconstructible are the boundaries of the self; ‘we’ know that our own motives, feelings and intentions constantly escape us; ‘I’ names only the current speaker, or the momentarily dominant self among many fluid identities.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 29 , March 1991 , pp. 213 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1991

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