my mind on books

I want to make note of the paradoxical notion of “selfless solipsism” from John V. Canfield’s book ‘The Looking-Glass Self’ (more on the book in yesterday’s post) since I have spent some years looking into various forms of nondualism (especially Advaita Vedanta).

So Canfield quotes Wittgenstein: “Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality coordinated with it.” (The Looking Glass Self, p. 46)

Misunderstanding the grammar of certain uses of “I,” we take it to be a singular referring expression. We are then left with the job of saying what sort of thing the referent of “I” is. The metaphysical issue, “What is the nature of the self?” thus results from a radical mistake about how language functions.

We have no trouble finding the “I” of “I am unshaven” or “I have a broken arm”; “I” here picks out a certain person. Nothing out of the ordinary here; persons live and breathe, move in space and time. But it is not so easy to find a referent for the “I” of “I feel happy” or “I think…” and like expressions.

In casting about for some suitable referent for “I,” for these cases, we may project our common garden concept of a person inward, thereby contriving a pseudo-person who has all the powers of a real person – thinking, perceiving, acting – but lacks the characteristic of occupying or filling up space, that is, lacks a body. To repeat: the need to invent this pseudo-person arises from the conviction, gained without argument or reflection, that “I,” like proper names and singular pronouns, refers.

(John V. Canfield, The Looking-Glass Self, p. 90)

I was intrigued to see that John V. Canfield has a new book coming out: Becoming Human: The Development of Language, Self and Self-Consciousness, since his earlier work The Looking-Glass Self: An Examination of Self-Awareness has been a favorite of mine. So I dug out my notes and found the excerpt quoted above. The Looking-Glass Self explores Wittgenstein’s views on the self with some Zen blended into the mix as well. Canfield is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto; his writing is clear and accessible to non-philosophers. The Looking-Glass Self is out of print and used copies are scarce, so check your library or ask for it through interlibrary loan. [update: Amazon has “Look inside the book” so you can read some online.] I’m looking forward to his new book.

The Google Custom Search Engine in the sidebar will now automatically search all the sites linked to from this site, which should make it a useful tool for finding book information and resources for “mind topics.” Once I added that setting I was happy with the results and it should keep getting better as more links are added.

I’ve been experimenting with a Google Custom Search Engine and have just added it to the sidebar (below the pale box that is the original site search box). Currently the Custom Search Engine searches LibraryThing, worldcat, and a few other sites. I took out Amazon because it was dominating the results too much. Also for some reason I couldn’t get results from Google Book Search to show up. More sites will be added and some further tweaking will occur whenever I figure it out. Comments and suggestions are always welcome!

[At some point the search bar wasn’t behaving well in the sidebar so I removed it, but the Custom Search Engine is available here.]

Lifetwo reviews Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar.

Vaughan at Mind Hacks is reading Muses, Madmen and Prophets, (on auditory hallucination) which he calls “poetic, wide-ranging and difficult to put down.”

Mind Hacks also pointed to a New York Times review of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally.

Issues in the Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science discusses ‘What is the self?’ focusing on Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Bradford Books)

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