The Construction of the Ego from Antiquity to Modernity

Author: Ozden Ozkaya Demirkhan   

Many thinkers, explicitly or implicitly, have addressed the concept of the self throughout the history of philosophy. However, the prevailing view is that, starting with Descartes, it was systematically approached and became a subject of philosophy. This book aims to critically examine the self and the ego from antiquity to Descartes, introducing contemporary thought and clarifying its historical development. In this study, the term "self" is used to mean that a person has self-awareness and perceives themselves as an executor of their cognitive faculties, while the term "ego" is used in the context of understanding all existence through the self. It is believed that the concept of the ego explicitly originated with Descartes. However, Augustine, approximately thirteen centuries before Descartes, adopted a similar understanding of the ego in his thought. Like Descartes, he also demonstrated the certainty of the ego by refuting skeptics. This study will examine the historical process of the concept of the ego, the contexts in which it was used, and its development. It will then address the concepts of the ego in Augustine and Descartes, clarifying the changes they introduced to previous concepts of the self and the traditions they followed. Given that they follow a single tradition, and to narrow the scope of the research, this study has been limited to examining the ideas of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Plotinus concerning the soul and the self.