Stephen Fry has joined the BBC series called “Philosophy Bites” and in the following animations he explains the everlasting philosophical topic – The Self.
These four videos deal with the notion of what it means to know oneself. Namely, the first video deals with Rene Descrates’s famous declaration “I think, therefore I am”; the second one is focused on Socrates himself, while the last two depict Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of human existence preceding human essence and Erving Goffman’s – “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”.
If the notions that we know nothing, that we have no fixed identities, that we create our self by our own actions, and that a trickster demon may be controlling our thoughts even as we read this seem too detached from everyday experience to easily grasp, at least we have a sensible English voice like Fry’s to guide us through them. Whichever of this thinkers sounds most plausible to you, you’ll come out feeling a bit surer that, whatever constitutes our selves — if indeed we have them — it isn’t what you might have assumed going in.
1. Rene Descrates – “I think therefore I am”
2. Socrates – “Know Thyself”
3. John Paul Sartre and the Existential Choice
4. Erving Goffman and the Performed Self
