Collection of Essays offers Analysis of “selfhood, the first-person pronoun ‘I’, and the first-person perspective.”

Imprint Academic just released, Selfhood, Autism and Thought Insertion, co-edited by Mihretu P. Guta and Sophie Gibb. Guta is currently teaching philosophy at Biola University, Azusa Pacific University, and Addis Ababa University. He is also working on a manuscript entitled The Metaphysics of Substance and Personhood: A Non-Theory Laden Approach. Sophie Gibb is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philoso­phy, Durham University. Recent papers are on the ontology of the mental causation debate, the subset account of property realization, and tropes and laws.

From the publisher’s description:

This book, a reprint of a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, presents engaging and informative analysis of three interrelated notions, namely: selfhood, the first-person pronoun ‘I’, and the first-person perspective. Philosophers have long debated about these notions on non-empirical grounds, often focusing on the question of whether the first-person pronoun ‘I’, beyond its role as a grammatical term, has an underlying implication for the ontology of selfhood. Philosophers continuously grapple with whether the first-person pronoun ‘I’ is a referring expression and, if it is, what its referent is or could be. To give an adequate treatment of such questions, philosophers have begun working across the relevant disciplines. This book highlights some excellent examples of the complex nature of first-person thoughts as they figure in linguistics, autism, thought insertion in schizophrenia, and the phenomenon of mental autonomy. In Selfhood, Autism and Thought Insertion, many of the leading philosophers working on this issue, as well as a few emerging scholars, have written 12 new essays addressing questions besetting the ontology of selfhood. The essays address topics as diverse as reflections on E.J. Lowe’s non-Cartesian substance dualism, physical determinism, the metaphysics and anti-metaphysics of the self, animalism, neo-Lockean persons, rationality and the first person, whether the first person is essentially a linguistic concept, first-person and third-person perspectives and autism, consciousness, the first-person perspective and neuro-imaging, thought insertion, and mental autonomy. The contributors to this volume do not agree in all of the details associated with the notion of selfhood, yet they all have a common conviction that the central questions besetting it must be taken seriously.

In 2011, Guta published an article in Philosophia Christi on “Frank Jackson’s Location Problem and Argument from the Self” (vol. 13, no. 1).