MIT Encyclopedia: “self”

24Ago07

O verbete “self” na MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences escrito por Stephen White traz à tona alguns dos problemas envolvendo o “eu”, o primeiro dos quais é o problema da identidade pessoal, que ele introduz sucinta e claramente, embora não mencione diretamente as teorias reducionistas. Eis o primeiro parágrafo do verbete:

Questions about the self are typically posed as questions about persons or minds, about such self-reflexive capacities as self-knowledge and self-reference, or about the semantics and pragmatics of “I.” For example, we think of the self or person as something that endures through changes in its mental states; but what is it that makes us the same person now who we were ten years ago? Among those who reject the idea of a nonphysical substance or soul, the debate has focused on the relative importance of bodily continuity (especially continuity of the brain) and psychological continuity (Williams 1973; Parfit 1984). Because the focus on psychological continuity entails that there could in principle be more than one person in a single human body, the debate has clear implications for controversies in clinical psychology such as that surrounding multiple personality subjects (Hacking 1995). More recently the debate has expanded to include such normative issues as the nature of the justification of the sacrifices that we ordinarily make for our future selves (White 1991; Rovane 1997), raising the question whether personhood is a metaphysical or a normative concept.

• Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, 1995.
• Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons. 1984
• Carol Rovane, The Bounds of Agency, 1997.
  
• Stephen L. White, The Unity of the Self, 1991.
• Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self. 1973

Filed under: bibliografia, identidade pessoal   |  1 Comment