Ships of Thesus

Reviews The Early Modern Subject by Udo Thiel a book in which the author reconstructs the many steps that subsequently led the early modern thinkers, from the Cartesians to the neo-Scholastics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke and Hume, to offer innovative accounts of the relations between reflective awareness and identity across time. The conjunction of these two characteristics is itself an early modern fact, numerous classical and medieval philosophers offered accounts of the nature of awareness and self-awareness. However, these early theories are very distant from modern ones, the older doctrines were often theories of animal perception, which accorded no special place to the rational being that speaks and makes a claim to knowledge; they were often doctrines of self-sensation, rather than self-consciousness. In fact, it was consciousness that was missing from these theories, as Thiel explains in the opening pages of his book that it was not until the 1720s that consciousness became an object of enquiry in its own right. The second characteristic - the identity of the thinking subject across time - is also difficult to track with great precision before the early modern age. With the emergence in later antiquity of a doctrine of the accountability of the moral person, and with the rise of theology that insisted on the resurrection of the body, the question of the persistence of the single thinking, living and acting subject - whether real or imaginary - became increasingly important. Yet demonstrated again by Thiel, it did not become a crucial element in the philosophy of the mind before the end of the seventeenth century. The two problems of self-awareness and identity through time met only in John Locke, and he is the most important figure in the historical argument of this book, since it was he that who united the two philosophical themes mentioned that might otherwise have remained distinct. Thiel argues that the link between self-awareness and self-identity rests on a threefold distinction: consciousness; the identity of the person; and the identity of the individual thinking substance. That doctrine is neither obvious nor simple, and Thiel demonstrates that a good part of the debates surrounding the relations between consciousness and personal identity in the eighteenth century can be understood as reformulations of its elements. In the final chapter, Thiel explores Hume and his Scottish critics and offers a brief analysis of the portions of the Treatise