Catalogue

Why do human beings interpret their overall experience in terms of selfhood? How was the notion and sense of self shaped at different times and in different cultures? What sort of problems or paradoxes did these constructions face? These lectures address these and related questions by sketching a roadmap of possible theoretical avenues for conceiving of the self, bringing to the foreground its soteriological implications, while also testing this theoretical outlook against insights offered by various disciplines (including philosophy, cognitive science, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, religious studies, intellectual history, and contemplative practices) and in specific historical cultures (ancient India and Greece, the modern West). The resulting journey is a way of practicing hermeneutics, the art of understanding and interpreting experience in its multifarious manifestations (which include different genres of written texts, oral traditions, social structures and practices, various sorts and domains of experience, ideas and ideals). This form of hermeneutics is best understood as ‘global hermeneutic’ both because of its temporal and geographical scope, and because of its interest on a phenomenon so broad and deeply rooted as selfhood. The purpose of the journey is not only descriptive, though. Exploring the cross-cultural spectrum of possible ways of conceiving of the self invites the more existential question of whether any of these possibilities might offer resources for dealing with the tragedies of today’s world, or maybe even saving it from some of them.

An open access pdf and printed version is published via the University of Groningen Press.

On the website of the University Library Special Collections, the digital exhibition “Beyond the Map. Descriptions of the non-European World in Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Maior” can be found.

Publisher Joan Blaeu (1599-1673), following the example of other cartographic publishers, included extensive accompanying texts with his renowned Atlas. The Dutch-language edition of Atlas Maior, the Grooten Atlas, contains nearly 4,000 pages of text. The texts of 20 selected non-European regions have been subjected to careful analysis by History students of the University of Groningen and presented in a beautiful digital exhibition.

Editor: Jeroen Bos

Editor: Marc Pauly.

This book was created as an open educational resource in the course Philosophy beyond Academia at the University of Groningen in 2023. Except for this introduction and the chapter Martin Buber’s I-It versus I-You Distinction, all of the chapters have been created by students of the MA Philosophy Programme of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Groningen.