Self and person: Different perspectives for a multifaceted individual

Abstract

This article offers an introduction to the concepts of self and person, drawing the lines defining them in the contemporary philosophical context. The main focus concerns the declension of both those concepts in the most recent phenomenological trend and in the embodied mind perspective in neuroscience, paying also attention to the sceptical position which many philosophers and neuroscientists argued for. In this sense, it will have a central role the perspective of Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, whose ideas are tightly linked with the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, like the perspective of Vittorio Gallese and Corrado Sinigaglia, whose focus in the context of the embodied mind shows the evident cultural debts it owes to French phenomenology, looking, then, at the theoretical potentialities offered by the mirror neurons mechanism. Finally, there will be a paragraph dedicated to the proposal for an immunologically defined self, argued by Antonio Damasio and another one dedicated to the emotional self, described by the neuroscientist A. D. Craig. The aim of this article is, therefore, to offer to the reader an introduction to the wide range of the contemporary theoretical proposals concerning the concepts of self and person, marking their multifaceted nature.