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Author Alpert, Avram, 1984- author.

Title Global origins of the modern self, from Montaigne to Suzuki / Avram Alpert
Published Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019]

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Montaigne and the other history of modernity -- Foundations of universalist global thought : Rousseau and Kant -- Aesthetic visions of the global self : Schiller and Senghor -- Dialectics and its discontents : Hegel, Marx, Fanon -- Radical pluralism I : Emerson -- Radical pluralism II : Du Bois -- Emptying the global self : Suzuki -- Coda : being-towards-bequeathment
Summary "We have long lived in a world made by global connections. Our products, our travels, our ideas--all of these have their origins in places and peoples both near and far. But when scholars narrate the history of the modern self, they ignore these connections and focus on changes in European science and philosophy. In this provocative new book, Avram Alpert argues that we need to rethink the story of the modern self as a global history. He first shows how canonical European thinkers like Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant explicitly formed their ideas of selfhood in relation to the travel accounts flooding into Europe from colonial missionaries. He then pushes this history beyond Europe, showing how a diverse series of writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and D.T. Suzuki, critiqued these ideas of global selfhood with their own creative responses. Spanning four continents and four centuries, the book argues that all of these writers partake of a shared global history forged in the violence of colonial rule. The resulting narrative shows that the modern self is not a European invention, but a global, evolving, and fraught attempt to make ourselves the kinds of beings who can live with the complexity of a world that is at once connected and never fully knowable"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on July 08, 2020)
Subject Self (Philosophy) -- History
PHILOSOPHY -- Mind & Body.
PSYCHOLOGY -- Personality.
Self (Philosophy)
Genre/Form Electronic books
History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 1438473869
9781438473864