When we imagine, previsage, and remember, do we engage in activities through which our selfhood or personhood is expressed, developed, and understood? In contemporary philosophy, the answer to this question has almost always been "No." Sometimes the self is taken to be a complex biological thing. Generally it is then added that this biological thing engages in certain so-called mental activities. But then how these activities are engaged in is either to be explained physically or modeled in a co…
Read moreWhen we imagine, previsage, and remember, do we engage in activities through which our selfhood or personhood is expressed, developed, and understood? In contemporary philosophy, the answer to this question has almost always been "No." Sometimes the self is taken to be a complex biological thing. Generally it is then added that this biological thing engages in certain so-called mental activities. But then how these activities are engaged in is either to be explained physically or modeled in a computer program, so that selfhood is not expressed and understood through these activities, but simply instanced in them. Or sometimes the self is thought, as in Sartre's existentialism, to be completely unconditioned, able to make itself into anything as a result of utterly arbitrary choice. Or sometimes it is thought to be epiphenomenal or fictive--not either a physical or introspectible something, so not a something at all.
