Events and Selves

Whitehead's concept of ‘Actual Entity’ has three-fold characters of Event, Self, and Monad, and this implies two theses, namely (i) Selves are kinds of events, and (ii) Events arises as Selves. In this paper, we are concerned with (i) and discuss what this thesis involves outside the context of Whitehead's own philosophy, because we think that his thought has a rather isolated status in analytical philosophical tradition by reason of his strange new words and complicated ways of thinking, and that we need some inquiries into events and selves before we directly face with Whiteheadian metaphysics. First, we discuss metaphysical status of Events chiefly in terms of Davidson's and Kim's conceptions of them, and characterize them as real, concrete but non-individual entities because they have no exact identity conditions and counting criteria. Secondly, we argue that some philosophical theories about Self, namely, Self as a soul, as a brain, as a fiction, as an entities beyond events, and as a subjective being not appearing in the objective world, are not completely plausible because they have several counter-intuitive results. One reason of these results seems to be taking Self as individual, or non-real, or non-concrete beings. We think that this suggests that the thesis of ‘Selves as events’ is at least a plausible hypothesis for understanding of Self, if events are characterized as real, concrete, but non-individual, as explained above. In this part, we touch on some of the arguments concerning Self by Descartes, Parfit, Hume, Searle, Nagel, and Evans. Thirdly, we point out some affinities between Whiteheadian thesis of Selves as Events and James's conception of multiple selves. Their common feature seems to be that Selves have no exact contours and only context dependent identity conditions, but that in spite of these characters they are concrete and real. We conclude that Whitehead's thesis (i) is at least not out of reasons and that this will also make thesis (ii) not an unintelligible one. But in order to argue the thesis (ii) adequately, we should take other important aspects of Self or Actual Entity as an arising entity and as an monad into account, but we should leave these issues to another occasion.