Ich-Skepsis und Jemand-sein

The cartesian dualism assumes two substances which are independent from each other – the body („res extensa“) and the thinking I, which is understood as soul or mind („res cogitans“). Against this conception argue - on the one hand - philosophical I-sceptics, today especially with recourse to scientific cognitions, whereas - on the other hand - it will be tried to avoid the cartesian dualism und the monistic physicalism by the recourse to the categories of human personality which are prepared in the antiquity and in medieval times. The present book tries to illustrate the thereby appearing conflict between physicalistic I-scepticism and metaphysics-based anthropology.
The first part discusses three proponents of I-scepticism who are assigned to the „philosophy of mind“: Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore and Thomas Metzinger. In the second part christian thinkers will come up for discussion, who stand in the tradition of those intellectual endeavors, which try to define the human personality by the unity of body, soul and mind: Edith Stein, Josef Pieper und Robert Spaemann.
The fundamental thesis of this work is that the question of the interaction between matter and mind, which is unsolved in the dualism, needs neither to lead to a monism nor to a relinquishment of the idea of self. A feasible justification of the diachronic perpetuity of self, which is experienced by human, is to be found especially in the context of a metaphysics of living substances. Thereby occurs no cancellation of the immediate world- and self-experience of human being and in this way freedom and self-determination are thinkable.