The question of the self – that is, the questions of who we are, how we become who we are, and why we change over the course of our lives – is one of the oldest and most intriguing questions of human thought. Scientific theories about how we experience our self are numerous and inexhaustible, and it was worth examining, criticising and defending them, as well as establishing their interrelationship, in this book, emphasised Janko Nešić, research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of the Institute for Social Sciences and author of the book Self: From One to Many and Back to None.
In doing so, one of his aims was to bring metaphysical and ontological theories, as well as the question of the phenomenology of the self, which have recently been marginalised, back to the centre of attention. Although Nešić’s perspective is primarily philosophical, with his book he also opens up a space for related disciplines, primarily sociology, psychology and neuroscience, which deal with the question of how our identity is formed and what biological, psychological and social processes are responsible for its shaping and transformation.
Ljiljana Radenović, full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Univertsity of Belgrade, sees the key contribution of Nešić’s book precisely in the fusion of three key approaches to the self: the metaphysical-ontological, the phenomenological, and the naturalistic one. And just as the marginalisation of phenomenology within psychology, with the aim of making it measurable, has its downsides, so too does the trend of excluding metaphysics from philosophy essentially harm philosophy as a science. Any attempt, as Radenović pointed out, to understand the self without including metaphysics remains necessarily unsatisfactory. The second speaker, Milan Urošević, a research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, offered a view of the self from a sociological perspective. While philosophy and metaphysics precede science, and thus the social sciences, the self, or subjectivity, is, in his view and in the spirit of Foucault, always necessarily to be considered in the context of social relations.
The series “Conversations about books of the Institute of Social Sciences – Let’s talk about…” is dedicated to IDN publications. Through discussions with the authors, we examine the results of their research, consider the broader scientific and social context of the book’s topic, and assess its relevance to society and public policies.
The editor of the series and moderator of the conversations is Dr. Irena Ristić (ISS).