Deutsche Gesellschaft
für phänomenologische Forschung

Zeitschrift | Band | Artikel

167203

George Herbert Mead and the unity of the self

Mitchell Aboulafia

pp. n/a

Abstrakt

After more than seventy-five years of scholarship on Mead’s notion of the self, commentators still debate the meaning of the term. There are those who argue that it should be understood primarily as a socially constructed “me,” while others claim that the self is a combination of the spontaneous “I” and the “me.” In addition, there are those who emphasize facets of the self that do not fit neatly into either of these two camps. Support for various interpretations of the self can in fact be found in Mead’s work. This article addresses Mead’s uses of the term, guided by two questions: what kinds of unity or continuity are characteristic of selves? And is there a form of unity – a “meta-self” – that can encompass the types of selves that we find in Mead? In response to the second question, it is demonstrated that Mead had a narrative account of the self, one that has the potential to incorporate different kinds of selves, although Mead left his account underdeveloped.

Publication details

Published in:

(2016) Dewey's democracy and education as a source of and a resource for european educational theory and practice. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 8 (1).

DOI: 10.4000/ejpap.465

Referenz:

Aboulafia Mitchell (2016) „George Herbert Mead and the unity of the self“. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 8 (1), n/a.