Richard Hallam

How do we know and understand who we really are as human beings? The concept of 'the self' is central to many strands of psychology and philosophy. This book tackles the problem of how to define persons and selves and discusses the ways in which different disciplines, such as biology, sociology and philosophy, have dealt with this topic. Richard S. Hallam examines the notion that the idea of the self as some sort of entity is a human construction and, in effect, a virtual reality. At the same time, this virtual self is intimately related to the reality of ourselves as biological organisms. Aiming to integrate a constructionist understanding of self with the universalizing assumptions that are needed in natural science approaches, this text is unique in its attempt to create a dialogue across academic disciplines, while retaining a consistent perspective on the problem of relating nature to culture.

Recent literature on the development of self in child development and in human social evolution is examined in the light of Gilbert Ryle's critique of the concept of mind. As an alternative to the currently popular theory-of-mind approach, it is proposed that a better conceptual foundation for theories of self can be built around a human capacity for higher-order relational reasoning about categories of human being, loosely 'persons' and their attributes, and a capacity to generate figurative conceptual entities such as mind and self