Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death

Drawing on classical antiquity and Western and Eastern philosophy, Richard Sorabji tackles in Self the question of whether there is such a thing as the individual self or only a stream of consciousness. According to Sorabji, the self is not an undetectable soul or ego, but an embodied individual whose existence is plain to see. Unlike a mere stream of consciousness, it is something that owns not only a consciousness but also a body.
Sorabji traces historically the retreat from a positive idea of self and draws out the implications of these ideas of self on the concepts of life and death, asking: Should we fear death? How should our individuality affect the way we live? Through an astute reading of a huge array of traditions, he helps us come to terms with our uneasiness about the subject of self in an account that will be at the forefront of philosophical debates for years to come. "There has never been a book remotely like this one in its profusion of ancient references on ideas about human identity and selfhood . . . . Readers unfamiliar with the subject also need to know that Sorabji breaks new ground in giving special attention to philosophers such as Epictetus and other Stoics, Plotinus and later Neoplatonists, and the ancient commentators on Aristotle (on the last of whom he is the world's leading authority)."--Anthony A. Long, Times Literary Supplement

“"This is an extraordinarily rich, learned, thoughtful and personal study of a fascinating subject. While exploring a remarkably wide range of subjectsembracing Eastern religion as well as classical Antiquity, the classical tradition and modern Western philosophythe book maintains a clear focus on a specific set of issues and concepts. Overall, a distinctive vision of the complex, many-layered subject of the self emerges, as well as an exceptionally informative and perceptive review of philosophical perspectives."Christopher Gill, University of Exeter”

"The range of Self is breathtaking. Sorabji displays a mastery of Greek, Roman, Medieval, early Christian, Islamic, Modern, Buddhist, and Hindu sources, as well as the work of contemporary philosophers in fields as diverse as ethics, metaphysics, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of language. . . . Self is an important book, and deserves to be read by all interested in its subject matter, whether they are philosophers, classicists, or psychologists."--James Stacey Taylor "Metapsychology"

"Richard Sorabji has accomplished what Vico envisioned and what Foucault, Taylor, and other philosophical anthropologists have variously attempted--namely, to provide a road map to the self. While others have explored the archaeology of the self with highly-selective demonstration excavations, Sorabji has taken up this same project with an astonishing breadth of systematic scholarship encompassing much of literate human history, ranging from the ancient Greco-Roman invention of the persona, Hindu and Buddhist explorations of personal identity to Christian, Islamic, and contemporary variants of the question, 'what is it to be myself.' With astonishing erudition and deep thinking, this is a rare work that captures the mystery of philosophy, its wondrously multi-faceted ineffability, as each of us looks into the mirror of the soul and wonders who we are exactly."

--David Glidden, University of California, Riverside (5/17/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"Richard Sorabji's books typically display a remarkable combination of virtues: meticulous scholarship, amazing historical range, philosophical insight and precision, and a vivid sense of the issues that a nonphilosophical reader will find interesting and engaging. Self may be his best, displaying all those virtues at a very high level. Sorabji has mastered not only the obvious texts of Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic philosophy, but also later texts that many philosophers ignore. Sorabji has a missionary enthusiasm for these texts, and writes about them with the sort of élan that will captivate readers."

--Martha Nussbaum (5/17/2006 12:00:00 AM)

"This is an extraordinarily rich, learned, thoughtful and personal study of a fascinating subject. While exploring a remarkably wide range of subjects--embracing Eastern religion as well as classical Antiquity, the classical tradition and modern Western philosophy--the book maintains a clear focus on a specific set of issues and concepts. Overall, a distinctive vision of the complex, many-layered subject of the self emerges, as well as an exceptionally informative and perceptive review of philosophical perspectives."

--Christopher Gill, University of Exeter (5/17/2006 12:00:00 AM)

Richard Sorabji is emeritus professor of ancient philosophy at King's College London and a fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Besides coediting The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions, and editing seventy volumes so far of The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, he is the author of Matter, Space and Motion; Animal Minds and Human Morals; Emotion and Peace of Mind; Aristotle on Memory; Necessity, Cause and Blame; and Time, Creation and the Continuum, the last three of which are also published by the University of Chicago Press.

This book collects salient observational data, derived predominantly from human studies, regarding the mechanism(s) of rejection in various pathologic conditions; the premise is that immune rejection, better defined as "immune-mediated, tissue-specific destruction" (TSD), comprises a broad range of phenomena ranging from tumor regression, to clearance of pathogen through destruction of infected cells, autoimmunity, allograft rejection by the host and host versus graft reactions. Like different hands can turn on or off a switch, distinct mechanisms can trigger TSD; however, a convergent pathway is ultimately observed when TSD occurs consisting of a dramatic switch from chronic to acute inflammation leading to the activation of a restricted number of genes that we comprise in the immunologic constant of rejection (ICR) model. Although the ICR model does not address "why" rejection occurs but rather "how", and it may not contribute an explanation for the determinism of rejection, it provides, if correct, a simplified road map about the convergent pathways leading to TSD. This offers the opportunity to identify a common target for immune manipulation with therapeutic purposes since ICR-related pathways are restricted in expression to the tissues in which TSD occurs while are shut off in the rest of a normal organism.The book includes chapters from outstanding basic and/or observational scientists that have contributed to this area either by defining mechanisms relevant to the understanding of the inflammatory switch or by describing how this occurs in human tissues under different pathological conditions. We would like to entice our reader(s) to test with us, through, the readings, whether our hypothesis is correct; we predict that common themes will emerge particularly if attention will be paid to the general phenomenon of TSD rather than the peculiarities of individual pathologies. With the hope of having contributed with this book something novel and important and we wish our reader a pleasant journey in the wondrous land of immune-mediated, tissue-specific destruction.

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