This path breaking volume brings together essays from three philosophical traditions, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and Indian philosophy, on a set of interrelated issues concerning the self. In addition to presenting a number of illuminating perspectives on the self and its relations to mental and bodily states, it represents an important contribution to the increasing dialogue between these traditions. Recent work at the intersection of analytic and Indian philosophy has increasingly moved beyond earlier comparative work to explore how the two traditions might actually learn from each other about how to approach issues of common concern. The present volume both contributes to this development, and brings the phenomenological tradition into the dialogue as well. There are no doubt important differences between these three traditions in terms of methodology, priorities, and broader goals, but the degree of overlap between their concerns in regard to the self, subjectivity, and consciousness is striking. There are, to my eye, three main issues that recur in these articles, interrelated questions to which each of the three traditions has devoted a great deal of thought. First, there is the question of whether there is a self, and if there is, what its nature is. In their very helpful introduction, the editors distinguish three main types of view canvassed in the contributions. Substantialist accounts, most familiar in the West from Descartes, view the self as a substance or property-bearer, either momentary or persisting; non-substantialist accounts regard the self as real but as consisting simply in consciousness itself, rather than a substance distinct from it; and no-self views simply deny the existence of a self, as for instance Hume, Parfit, and many Buddhists do. The second central issue concerns whether consciousness is necessarily reflexive, i.e. aware of itself: When I am aware of the table in front of me, am I also necessarily aware of this awareness of the table? Both the Buddhist and Western traditions are divided on this question, which is at least related, if not identical, to the current debate between higher-order and same-order theories of consciousness. Finally, there is the question of whether the self is reducible to lower-level mental and physical phenomena, what Buddhists refer to as the five skandhas.
John Spackman (Fri,) studied this question.