Introduction: Subjectivity and Selfhood in the History of Philosophy

In our everyday dealings with ourselves, other persons and the world, we commonly take our selves, or the entities signified by our employment of the first-personal pronoun ‘I’ in simple assertoric sentences such as ‘I am’, ‘I think’, or ‘I am walking’, to be the uncontroversial loci of our experiences of being, knowing, and acting. But when we glance at contemporary literature on the philosophy of mind and action, on a steady increase for much of the twentieth and the present century in naturalist, analytic, and phenomenological approaches alike, we find that few of the intuitions we may have about that first-personal pivot actually stand uncontested. In fact, it rather seems that if there…