Selves : subpersonal , immersed , and participating

This book marks the beginning of a new phase in the philosophical investigation of classical and contemporary accounts of the self: canonical boundaries have been crossed and doctrinal justification abandoned in favor of a cosmopolitan ideal of syncretic, theoretically perspicuous, and historically informed systematic reflection. That such reflection bears on so central a concept as the self is only fitting given its implications for a broad range of questions concerning agency, the mind-body problem, and self-knowledge that are now pursued across a number of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. But Ganeri is not simply interested in bringing the wealth of Indian speculations on the self to bear on contemporary discussions, in the hope of supplying a much-needed corrective lens, fill in some important lacunae, or bring another voice to the table. Rather, the goal is to think with these classical Indian thinkers (of which, no less than 21 are debated at length) and beyond prevailing Western views in forging a new and in many respects original conception of the self. In a work of such breadth and complexity, the question naturally arises: what sort of approach is best suited to integrate the range of perspectives at hand into one unified account? Ganeri clarifies his methodological stance from the outset: following a distinction introduced by Strawson (1966) between the ‘hard’ naturalism of scientific explanation and the ‘liberal’ naturalism embedded in ‘our nature’ as human beings, Ganeri opts for a version of the latter. The result is a framework of analysis that allows for the sui generis naturalistic thought of first-millennium India to be presented in an uncompromising light, while making space for a conception of ‘mindedness’ free of any Cartesian assumptions about the tension between mental and natural. Along the way he succeeds in constructing a rich analytic taxonomy that is able to supplant, and in many ways correct, prevailing models, chiefly those of Cartesianism, Physicalism, and Reductionism (whether of the Humean or the Buddhist variety). Two central concepts, that of ‘base’ (āśraya) and of ‘place’ (ādhāra) serve as heuristically useful Phenom Cogn Sci DOI 10.1007/s11097-014-9405-8