Raymond Martin

A good historian often can assess the relative likelihood of competing historical claims more reliably on implicit grounds - intuitively, if you like - than in any other available way. This idea has been a persistent theme of Verstehen-theorists. It is, in essence, the old saw that there is no substitute for the brewmaster's nose, adapted to the art of producing historical brew. If true, it augments the importance of the historian relative to that of his arguments, and thereby gives him a dignity that he might otherwise lack. And some have thought that it marks an important methodological difference between historical studies and the natural sciences. It is, in its way, a humane idea. But is it true?

What really matters fundamentally in survival? That question—the one on which I focus—is not about what should matter or about metaphysics. Rather, it is a factual question the answer to which can be determined, if at all, only empirically. I argue that the answer to it is that in the case of many people it is not one’s own persistence, but continuing in ways that may involve one’s own cessation that really matters fundamentally in survival. Call this the surprising result. What are we to make of it? According to several philosophers, not much. I argue that these philosophers are wrong. What best explains the surprising result is that in the case of many people one’s special concern for oneself in the future is not fundamental, but derived. I explain what this means. Finally I explain why the task of explaining empirically what matters fundamentally in survival is in some ways more like a meditative quest than a traditional inquiry in western philosophy or social science and, as such, is best answered not by psychologists, but by philosophers.

This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west.

In this extraordinarily rich and provocative book by an eminent intellectual historian and philosopher, Richard Sorabji argues persuasively that there was “an intense preoccupation” among ancient western thinkers with self and related notions. In the process, he provides fresh translations and often novel interpretations of the most important passages relevant to this contention in a host of thinkers, including Homer, Epicharmus, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Chrysippus, Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, Hierocles, Marcus Aurelius, Tertullian, Origen, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, Porphyry, Methodius, Themistius, Augustine, and Proclus, among others. Sorabji’s nuanced, insightful, and often novel interpretations of passages from these and other writers are invariably woven together in an illuminating way, often with an eye to modern developments. There is no other book that covers the classical western material on self and related notions anywhere near as thoroughly or as perceptively. As a consequence for decades to come this book is destined to be a major point of departure for future discussion of classical authors on such issues. That in itself..

Does anyone ever survive his or her bodily death ? Could anyone? No speculative questions are older than these, or have been answered more frequently or more variously. None have been laid to rest more often, or — in our times — with more claimed decisiveness. Jay Rosenberg, for instance, no doubt speaks for many contemporary philosophers when he claims, in his recent book, to have ‘ demonstrated ’ that ‘ we cannot [even] make coherent sense of the supposed possibility that a person's history might continue beyond that person's [bodily] death’

This book is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the nature of the self, personal identity and survival. Its distinctive methodology is one that is phenomenologically descriptive rather than metaphysical and normative. On the basis of this approach Raymond Martin shows that the distinction between self and other is not nearly as fundamental a feature of our so-called egoistic values as has been traditionally thought. He explains how the belief in a self as a fixed, continuous point of observation enters into our experience of ourselves and the world. He also reveals the explosive implications this thesis has for recent debates over personal identity and what matters in survival. This is the first book of analytic philosophy directly on the phenomenology of identity and survival. It builds bridges between analytic and phenomenological traditions and, thus, to open up a new field of investigation.