Publisher's Synopsis
A Prelude to the Study of Self Throughout the history of the philosophical discourses the notion of "self or "soul" has always associated a great sense of wonder in the minds of the philosophers of mind. This sense of wonder has been variously expressed in a number of fundamental questions. What is self? Do we really have a nonphysical orimmaterial soul, inaccessible to science and knowable only via metaphysical inquiry? Or, is the human self or mind nothing but the brain? Is thought an aspect of physical matter, just a by-product of nerves being fired or stimulated in the brain? What is consciousness? What is personal identity? How can we be the same person from childhood to the old age? Can it be aid that the mental continuity of a person is a continuity of memory and habit? Why can't be said that there was yesterday one person whose feelings and experiences I can remember, and that person I regard as myself of yesterday? These are some of the fundamental questions which have drawn the attention of many philosophers in the history if western philosophy. There are philosophers who have argued that man is no more than his body and the various experiences he goes through. Thus Democritus once said that nature consists of two things only, namely, space, which is vacuum and atoms. Being a thorough materialist, he held that thought can be explained in the same way that any other phenomenon can, namely, as the movement of atoms. This view of Democritus is shared by many other philosophers who are known as materialists or physicalists,
