Selves, People, And Persons: What Does It Mean to be a Self?

This volume of the Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion addresses the meaning of selfhood. The eleven contributors explore this urgent question by reshaping fundamental ideas of the self in such varied fields as theology, biology, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy.

The meaning of selfhood has become an urgent question, largely in reaction to the radical individualism in which many modern Western notions of selfhood have been cast. The eleven contributors to Selves, People, and Persons reshape fundamental ideas of the self in such varied fields as theology, biology, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy. Nearly all of them agree that selves are always to be understood in relation to the communities of which they are a part.