The Self in Question: Memory, The Body and Self-Consciousness

by Andy Hamilton

A humanistic account of self-consciousness and personal identity, and offering a structural parallel between the epistemology of memory and bodily awareness. It provides a much-needed rapprochement between Analytic and Phenomenological approaches, developing Wittgenstein's insights into I-as-subject and self-identification.

266 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Andy Hamilton teaches Philosophy, and also History and Aesthetics of Jazz, at Durham University, UK. He was also until recently Adjunct Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia, Perth, and has taught music aesthetics at Hong Kong University.

He specialises in aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, J.S. Mill and Wittgenstein, and has published Aesthetics and Music (Continuum, 2007), Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser's Art (University of Michigan Press, 2007), The Self In Question: Memory, the Body and Self-Consciousness (Palgrave, 2013), and Scruton's Aesthetics, edited with Nick Zangwill (Palgrave, 2011).

The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Wittgenstein and "On Certainty" will appear in 2014, and The Aesthetics of Rhythm, edited with Max Paddison, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. At the moment he is working on monographs on The Autonomy of Art, and on books of conversations with cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, and improvising pianist Steve Beresford.

He is a long-standing contributor to "The Wire", "Jazz Review" and "International Piano" magazines, interviewing and writing features on jazz and classical musicians and composers such as Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Elliott Carter, Kaija Saariaho and Christian Wolff.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Self in Question explores the role of memory and the body in relation to personal identity and self-consciousness. Hamilton defends a view of the memory criterion, which began with Locke: that the persistence of memories is necessary for self identity. Bishop Butler and Thomas Reid criticized this view for being circular. I want to take up a few themes of the book without tackling the whole thing. What I find most valuable about this book is where he takes up the view of materialism about the body and rejects a strictly "bodily-psychological divide." Hamilton believes that only a few figures from Locke to Merleau-Ponty hold a view of body that he holds. He criticizes most contemporary personal identity theory, for example Parfit, Cassam, Chalmers. To put it most explicitly, "The account is a development of Locke's view that to experience a limb as mine -- to feel it when it is touched, to be conscious of it as hot or cold and as having other "affections", to have sympathy and concern for it -- is necessary and sufficient for it to be mine" (7). Underlying this view is a criticism of Hume (and Parfit's) "bundle theory" with Kant's "unity of consciousness." When I use the word "I" and ascribe certain memories or proprioceptive abilities to myself, this self is substantial and not just contingent. This view has ramifications for "self-identification and self-reference in light of discussion of the epistemology of self-knowledge" (8).

(if you want to read more of this review, go to my blog)