Me, Myself And I
In this blog, David James, chairperson of IET Sussex Network, discusses how we perceive ourselves, considering both old philosophical thoughts and behaviour of people in present digital age. I was recently reading a book on philosophy ( Fullerton, 1915 ), as one does during a lockdown, and was particularly interested in the views of philosophers through the ages on the subject of the ’mind’ and how people viewed themselves beyond their physical self. Views lurched from one extreme to the other and were almost always contentious, with different factions holding different views. Early philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle considered the mind to be somehow divorced from the body, like a breath, and then Descartes, in the seventeenth century, decided that the mind was located within the pineal…