TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. heterogeneities of self in everyday life 2. a language of successive selves 3. multiplicity through dissociation 4. succession and recurrence outside dissociative disorder 5. From abnormal psychology to metaphysics: a methodological preamble 6. memory, responsibility, and contrition 7. purposes and discourses of responsibility ascription 8. multiplicity and legal culpability 9. paternalistic intervention 10. responsibilities over oneself in the future of one's future selves 11. a mataphysics of successive selves 12. the normative tug of individualism 13. therapeutic goals for a liberal culture 14. continuity sufficient for individualism 15. the divided minds of mental disorder 16. the grammar of disownership.

This text examines how research in embodied cognition and enactivism can contribute to our understanding of the nature of self-consciousness, the metaphysics of personal identity, and the disruptions to self-awareness that occur in cases of psychopathology.

Could a single human being ever have multiple conscious minds? Some human beings do. The corpus callosum is a large pathway connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. In the second half of the twentieth century a number of people had this pathway cut through as a treatment for epilepsy. They became colloquially known as split-brain subjects. After the two hemispheres of the brain are cortically separated in this way, they begin to operate unusually independently of each other in the realm of thought, action, and conscious experience, almost as if each hemisphere now had a mind of its own. Philosophical discussion of the split-brain cases has overwhelmingly focused on questions of psychological identity in split-brain subjects, questions like: how many subjects of experience is a split-brain subject? How many intentional agents? How many persons? On the one hand, under experimental conditions, split-brain subjects often act in ways difficult to understand except in terms of each of them having two distinct streams or centers of consciousness. Split-brain subjects thus evoke the duality intuition: that a single split-brain human being is somehow composed of two thinking, experiencing, and acting things. On the other hand, a split-brain subject nonetheless seems like one of us, at the end of the day, rather than like two people sharing one body. In other words, split-brain subjects also evoke the unity intuition: that a split-brain subject is one person. Elizabeth Schechter argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human being: right and left. On the other hand, each split-brain subject is nonetheless one of us. The key to reconciling these two claims is to understand the ways in which each of us is transformed by self-consciousness.

The Oxford Handbook of the Self explores a fascinating diversity of questions about our understanding of self from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, ethics, psychology, neuroscience, psychopathology, narrative, and postmodern theories.

Problems of Living: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Cognitive-Affective Science addresses philosophical questions related to problems of living, including questions about the nature of the brain-mind, reason and emotion, happiness and suffering, goodness and truth, and the meaning of life. It draws on critical, pragmatic, and embodied realism as well as moral naturalism, and brings arguments from metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics together with data from cognitive-affective science. This multidisciplinary integrated approach provides a novel framework for considering not only the nature of mental disorders, but also broader issues in mental health, such as finding pleasure and purpose in life. - Draws on the strongest aspects of polar positions in philosophy and psychiatry to help resolve important perennial debates in these fields - Explores continuities between early philosophical work and current cognitive-affective sciences, including neuroscience and psychology - Employs findings from modern cognitive-affective science to rethink key long-standing debates in philosophy and psychiatry - Builds on work showing how mind is embodied in the brain, and embedded in society, to provide an integrated conceptual framework - Assesses both the insights and the limitations of cognitive-affective science for addressing the big questions and hard problems of living

A philosopher who has experienced psychosis argues that recovery requires regaining agency and autonomy within a therapeutic relationship based on mutual trust. In Mental Patient, philosopher Abigail Gosselin uses her personal experiences with psychosis and the process of recovery to explore often overlooked psychiatric ethics. For many people who struggle with psychosis, she argues, psychosis impairs agency and autonomy. She shows how clinicians can help psychiatric patients regain agency and autonomy through a positive therapeutic relationship characterized by mutual trust. Patients, she says, need to take an active role in regaining their agency and autonomy—specifically, by giving testimony, constructing a narrative of their experience to instill meaning, making choices about treatment, and deciding to show up and participate in life activities. Gosselin examines how psychotic experience is medicalized and describes what it is like to be a patient receiving mental health care treatment. In addition to mutual trust, she says, a productive therapeutic relationship requires the clinician’s empathetic understanding of the patient’s experiences and perspective. She also explains why psychotic patients sometimes feel ambivalent about recovery and struggle to stay committed to it. The psychiatric ethics issues she examines include the development of epistemic agency and credibility, epistemic justice, the use of coercion, therapeutic alliance, the significance of choice, and the taking of responsibility. Mental Patient differs from straightforward memoirs of psychiatric illness in that it analyses philosophic issues related to psychosis and recovery, and it differs from other books on psychiatric ethics in that its analyses are drawn from the author’s first-person experiences as a mental patient.

Many of us have multiple identities, says Edwina Barvosa. We may view ourselves according to ethnicity, marital or family roles, political affiliation, sexuality, or any of several other “identities” we may use to organize our behavior and self-understanding at any given time. Various domains have offered nuggets of insight regarding the characteristics and political implications of seeing the self as made up of multiple identities, but many questions remain. In Wealth of Selves, Edwina Barvosa constructs an ambitious interdisciplinary blend of these insights and crafts them into an overarching theoretical framework for understanding multiple identities in terms of intersectionality, identity contradiction, and the political potential that lies within the practices of self-integration. Grounded in Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness as well as in Western political thought, this reconsideration of the self promises to reshape our thinking on issues such as immigrant incorporation, national identity, political participation, the socially constructed sources of will and political critique, and the longevity of racial and gender conflicts. With its accessible style and rich cross-pollination among disciplines, Wealth of Selves will reward readers in political science, philosophy, race, ethnic, and American studies, as well as in borderlands, sexuality, and gender studies.

A long history of inquiry about human nature and the self stretches from the ancient tradition of Socratic self-knowledge in the context of ethical life to contemporary discussions of brain function in cognitive science. It begins with a conflict among the ancients. On one view, which comes to be represented most clearly by Aristotle, the issue is settled in terms of a composite and very complex human nature. Who I am is closely tied to my embodied existence. The other view, found as early as the Pythagoreans, and developed in the writings of Plato, Augustine and Descartes, held that genuine humanness is not the result of an integration of 'lower' functions, but a purification of those functions in favour of a liberating spirituality. The animal elements are excluded from the human essence. The modern debate on the problem of the self, although owing much to the insights of Locke and Hume, can still be situated within the context of the two schools of ancient thought, and this has led many to despair over the lack of apparent progress in this problem. Today, of course, we often tend to look to science rather than philosophy to develop our understanding of a wide range of fundamental issues. To what extent is the problem of the self a scientific issue? Can insights from the study of neuropsychology and cognitive development in infancy provide a new perspective? Can the study of schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorders tell us anything about the nature of human self-consciousness? Many would answer yes to the above questions, but then is it not also the case that the study of exceptional 'self-actualised' human experience is equally relevant? And can the phenomenological tradition, dedicated to the systematic study of human experience, and contemporary analytic approaches in philosophy help us out of some of the impasses that have bedevilled the empiricist tradition? MODELS OF THE SELF includes all these perspectives in an attempt to cast light on one of the most intractable problems in science and the humanities.

In light of the potential novel applications of neurotechnologies in psychiatry and the current debate on moral bioenhancement, this book outlines the reasons why more conceptual work is needed to inform the scientific and medical community, and society at large, about the implications of moral bioenhancement before a possible, highly hypothetical at this point, broad acceptance, and potential implementation in areas such as psychiatry (e.g., treatment of psychopathy), or as a measure to prevent crime in society. The author does not negate the possibility of altering or manipulating moral behavior through technological means. Rather he argues that the scope of interventions is limited because the various options available to “enhance morality” improve, or simply manipulate, some elements of moral behavior and not the moral agent per se in the various elements constitutive of moral agency. The concept of Identity Integrity is suggested as a potential framework for a responsible use of neurotechnologies in psychiatry to avoid human beings becoming orderers and orderables of technological manipulations.