Article,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sources of the Self.
1997, (1997)
Abstract
"We see neither the soul of others, because it hides itself, nor our own, because we have no mirror in the mind", wrote Rousseau in 1757. In this collection of previously unpublished papers, David Gauthier, Martin Hollis, Robert Wokler, Nicholas Dent, John Hope Mason, Howard Caygill, Zev Trachtenberg and Timothy O'Hagan address the multi-faceted conceptions of the self elaborated by Rousseau, psychologist, pedagogue, literary theorist and political philosopher. Jean-Jacques emerges as a writer of extraordinary subtlety and sophistication, one of the first and most powerful critics of the myth of "man's glassy essence", of the idea that the self is a transparent, self-evident given.
