From Mary Midgley
Your special issue on the self repeats the errors of earlier thinking (23 February, p 32). The contributors give us a string of straw men – views such as “we regard ourselves as unchanging” (p 34). They say these are central to our idea of ourselves, but actually they are just a continuation of parts of the argument by 17th-century philosopher René Descartes for a separate, substantial soul.
Finding it easy to class these views as illusions, the writers then provide a source for them. They imply, by using words like “tricked” and “elaborate”, that some conjuror – probably “the mind” or “the brain” – has played the part of Descartes’s deity-like Great Deceiver. Such drama would only make sense inside Descartes’s dualist world of separate mind and body, a place that we no longer need to visit.
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
