Mirages Of The Selfe: Patterns Of Personhood In Ancient And Early Modern Europe Patterns Of Personhood In Ancient And Early Modern Europe

Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a person--to experience who-ness--in other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes Essences Of Glass, Histories Of Humans -- A Cock For Aesclepius : Plato, The Hippocratics, And Aristotle -- Excursus On Will And Passibility -- Cicero's Person, Passible Minds, And Real Worlds -- Senecan Surroundings -- How Were Slaves Persons? -- How Was Personhood Gendered? -- The Public Materiality Of Being Human : Galen And Medical Traditions -- Two-timed Ipseities And Speaking Their Mind : Augustine -- Excursus On The Middle Ages -- Measuring Tensions In The Medieval Microcosm -- Multum A Me Ipso Differe Compulsus Sum -- Sparsa Anime Fragmenta Recolligam -- Surrounded Selves And Public Being : Sixteenth-century Strains -- Persons, Passions, Pictures : Loyola With Alberti -- Hélisenne's Story : Collective Love, Singular Anger -- Public Subject, Personal Passion : Montaigne -- Descartes, Collective Tradition, And Personal Agency -- Selfehood, Political Community, And A Cartesian Future? Timothy J. Reiss. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [529]-584) And Index.