Self and Sensibility

Essays in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy of Mind

Udo Thiel, Dieter Hüning, Stefan Klingner, Giuseppe Motta, Gideon Stiening

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9783111387598
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This volume collects 19 of the author's essays on eighteenth-century accounts of self-consciousness, personal identity and related issues, covering over a hundred years of a philosophical debate that has shaped the way in which these topics are discussed today. After a detailed analysis of the seventeenth-century background, the essays analyze and critically evaluate French, British and German contributions, ranging from Claude Buffier early in the century to Kant and aspects of the Post-Kantian debate. The essays deal with a large number of diverse sources, including the views and arguments of well-known philosophers such as Hume and Kant, as well as lesser-known thinkers, such as LeLarge de Lignac and Thomas Cooper, organized around four, partly overlapping main themes: a) the self and its identity as a matter of a special 'feeling' ( sentiment intime, Selbstgefüh l) in thinkers such as Condillac, Rousseau and Feder, b) materialist treatments of these issues in, for example, Priestley and Hißmann, c) Scottish Common Sense accounts, with a special focus on Reid, and d) Kant's analysis and the philosophical context in which it was developed, with a particular emphasis on the German debate (Wolff and his critics, Lossius, Tetens and others).

Table of contents

• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction: Self and Sensibility
• I The Seventeenth-Century Background: From Locke to Hume
• 1 Personal Identity
• 2 Hume on the Self and His ‘Overall Philosophical Scheme’
• II The Feeling of Self: From Claude Buffier to Rousseau
• 3 From Intimate Sentiment to Pure Self- Consciousness: Buffier and Lelarge de Lignac
• 4 Self and Sensibility: From Locke to Condillac and Rousseau
• 5 Between Leibniz and Locke: Charles Bonnet on Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity
• III Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity in Eighteenth-Century Materialism
• 6 Locke in Göttingen
• 7 Varieties of Inner Sense. Two Pre-Kantian Theories
• 8 Locke and Eighteenth-Century Materialist Conceptions of Personal Identity
• 9 Religion and materialist metaphysics: Some aspects of the debate about the resurrection of the body in eighteenth-century Britain
• IV Consciousness and Common Sense
• 10 Consciousness and Common Sense: From Claude Buffier to Thomas Brown
• 11 Reid and Higher Order Theories of Consciousness
• V Kant in Context 1: Consciousness and Self-Consciousness
• 12 Between Wolff and Kant: Mérian’s Theory of Apperception
• 13 Experience and Inner Sense: Feder–Lossius–Kant
• 14 Kant and Tetens on the Unity of the Self
• 15 Consciousness, Inner Sense and Self- Consciousness in the 1760s
• VI Kant in Context 2: Personhood and the Feeling of Self
• 16 The Concept of a Person in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy: Leibniz – Wolff – Kant
• 17 The Critique of Rational Psychology
• 18 Priestley and Kant on Materialism
• 19 Between Empirical Psychology and Transcendental Philosophy: Ernst Platner on the Feeling of Self
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index of Names