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.

A psychiatrist studies the patterns of social interaction, paying special attention to the relationship between individual experience and behavior

Body/Self/Other brings together a variety of phenomenological perspectives to examine the complexity of social encounters across a range of social, political, and ethical issues. It investigates the materiality of social encounters and the habitual attitudes that structure lived experience. In particular, the contributors examine how constructions of race, gender, sexuality, criminality, and medicalized forms of subjectivity affect perception and social interaction. Grounded in practical, everyday experiences, this book provides a theoretical framework that considers the extent to which fundamental ethical obligations arise from the fact of individuals' intercorporeality and sociality.

In today’s world, people speak more than 6000 languages and identify with thousands of cultural groups and a large variety of different religions. Despite such a number of differences, these and other features of human diversity are housed politically, inside roughly 200 nation-states. Globally speaking, a diverse citizenry is an unavoidable fact for most countries across the planet. Additionally, developments such as transnational migrations, rising socio-economic inequalities, the “War(s) on Terror”, and political movements based on absolutist ideologies continue to raise broader questions of justice, governance, equality, quality of life and social cohesion. As such, recent decades have witnessed a revival of debates concerning what it means to be a “citizen”. In response to such trends, nations such as Australia, Canada, and Britain have committed themselves to teaching citizenship through their national curriculums. Moreover, all European Union member states have integrated some form of citizenship education into their primary and secondary curriculums. Acknowledging such developments, this book uses discussions with citizenship educators as a backdrop for a critical analysis of various conceptions of citizenship, such as liberal, social-democratic, civic-republican, cosmopolitan and multicultural citizenship. It also analyses how these educators approach the contemporary reality of nation states, which are richly composed of a diverse citizenry. Given Britain’s transformation into a multi-ethnic and multi-faith society, this book develops, as a case study, an understanding of how religious and cultural difference can be approached. What makes this work unique is that it gleans ideas and research from a wide field of international scholarship, such as political science, philosophy, education, and cultural studies. A further unique aspect of the book is that it uses the q-methodology, a research method used to study people’s viewpoints, to reveal some shared perspectives on citizenship. In doing so, the path traced here leads to the discovery of spaces where citizenship educators – despite their ethnic/religious diversity – display “common ground” on values, beliefs and aims related to citizenship. This book will prove to be a useful resource for academics, educators and political leaders, as well as interfaith and civil society professionals at large. It is worth mentioning that even though this book has benefited from the generously contributed ideas of citizenship educators in England, its scholarly research, lessons, arguments, analysis and suggestions, which focus on multi-faith and multi-ethnic societies, will also be useful elsewhere.

This study presents an explanation and critical examination of the theories of Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl and Hegel on the fundamental relationships between persons. It also synthesizes the results into a new conception of one's relation to other people. Sartre's famous discussion of 'the Look' in his early treatise, Being and Nothingness, is the point of departure and central text.

A notable contribution to our understanding of ourselves. This book explores the realm of human behavior in social situations and the way that we appear to others. Dr. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework. Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and cotnrol the impressions they form of him, and employs certain techniques in order to sustain his performance, just as an actor presents a character to an audience. The discussions of these social techniques offered here are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.

Self and Other in an Age of Uncertain Meaning explores the nature and origins of widespread problems of self in modern societies. It examines the paradoxical interplay between the modern world's many benefits and freedoms, and its mounting social challenges and psycho-emotional impacts. Over time the character of consciousness has shifted in concert with societal trends. The experienced world has become more nuanced, fragmented, and uncertain, as well as increasingly personal and intimate, reshaping social relationships. Chapters analyze the interdependence of language, mind, intimacy, the self, and culture, arguing that as the coevolution of these five factors produced the modern world, many features of contemporary culture have become disruptive to security of being. The book explores the importance to the vital sense of self in constructing relationships based in mutual recognition of moral and intellectual equality between partners. Rich with examples from everyday experience, this text offers profound insights for those interested in sociology, psychoanalysis, psychology, communication, history, and culture.