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
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Epistemologie in der Philosophie

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, Selbstgefühl) 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