The Early Modern Subject explores the understanding of self-consciousness and personal identity—two fundamental features of human subjectivity—as it developed in early modern philosophy. Udo Thiel presents a critical evaluation of these features as they were conceived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He explains the arguments of thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume, as well as their early critics, followers, and other philosophical contemporaries, and situates them within their historical contexts. Interest in the issues of self-consciousness and personal identity is in many ways characteristic and even central to early modern thought, but Thiel argues here that this is an interest that continues to this day, in a form still strongly influenced by the conceptual frameworks of early modern thought. In this book he attempts to broaden the scope of the treatment of these issues considerably, covering more than a hundred years of philosophical debate in France, Britain, and Germany while remaining attentive to the details of the arguments under scrutiny and discussing alternative interpretations in many cases.

Detailed list of contents vii

Preface to the Paperback Edition xii

Acknowledgements xiv

Introduction: aims and issues 1

PART I. THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BACKGROUND

1. The ontological view of the self: Scholastic and Cartesian conceptions 35

2. Metaphysical alternatives: conceptions of identity, morality, and the afterlife 61

PART II. LOCKE'S SUBJECTIVIST REVOLUTION

3. Locke on identity, consciousness, and self-consciousness 97

4. Locke on personal identity: consciousness, memory, and self-concern 121

PART III. PROBLEMS WITH LOCKE: CRITIQUE AND DEFENCE

5. The notion of a person and the role of consciousness and memory 153

6. The charge of circularity and the argument from the transitivity of identity 190

PART IV. SUBJECTIVITY AND IMMATERIALIST METAPHYSICS OF THE MIND

7. The soul: human and universal 224

8. Relating to the soul, pure thought, original sin, and the afterlife 248

PART V. SUBSTANCE, APPERCEPTION, AND IDENTITY: LEIBNIZ, WOLFF, AND BEYOND

9. Individuation and identity, apperception and consciousness in Leibniz and Wolff 279

10. Beyond Leibniz and Wolff: from immortality to the necessary 'unity of the subject' 315

11. From the critique of Wolffian apperception to the idea of the 'pre-existence' of self-consciousness 343

PART VI. BUNDLES AND SELVES: HUME IN CONTEXT

12. Hume and the belief in personal identity 383

13. Hume and the bundle view of the self 407

Conclusion: beyond Hume and Wolff 431

Bibliography 438

Index 471

Udo Thiel studied Philosophy at the Universities of Marburg, Bonn, and Oxford. He began as a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sydney, later moving to the Australian National University in Canberra where he became a Senior Lecturer and then Associate Professor. In 2009 he moved to Austria where he is now Professor of the History of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Graz. His research focuses on early modern epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind.

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