ISBN Self and Other ( Exploring Subjectivity Empathy and Shame ) book English Hardcover 296 pages

Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially constructed? How do we at all come to understand others? Does empathy amount to and allow for a distinct experiential acquaintance with others and if so what does that tell us about the nature of selfhood and social cognition? Does a strong emphasis on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a necessary requirement for the latter? Engaging with debates and findings in classical phenomenology in philosophy of mind and in various empirical disciplines Dan Zahavi's new book Self and Other offers answers to these questions. Discussing such diverse topics as self-consciousness phenomenal externalism mindless coping mirror self-recognition autism theory of mind embodied simulation joint attention shame time-consciousness embodiment narrativity self-disorders expressivity and Buddhist no-self accounts Zahavi argues that any theory of consciousness that wishes to take the subjective dimension of our experiential life serious must endorse a minimalist notion of self. At the same time however he also contends that an adequate account of the self has to recognize its multifaceted character and that various complementary accounts must be integrated if we are to do justice to its complexity. Thus while arguing that the most fundamental level of selfhood is not socially constructed and not constitutively dependent upon others Zahavi also acknowledges that there are dimensions of the self and types of self-experience that are other-mediated. The final part of the book exemplifies this claim through a close analysis of shame.