PLATO

The mind is the sense of self and it desires an understanding of the Forms. The soul is the
driving force behind body and mind. Plato argues that the soul is eternal and, in his later works,
he toys with the idea of the afterlife. He also explains the soul as having three functions -
reason, emotion, and desire
Plato: an eternal soul, which is from the true world

ARISTOTLE
Aristotle, for his part, insisted that the human being is a composite of body and soul and that
the soul cannot be separated from the body. Aristotle’s philosophy of self was constructed in
terms of hylomorphism in which the soul of a human being is the form or the structure of the
human body or the human matter, the functional organization in virtue of which human
beings are able to perform their characteristic activities of life, including growth, nutrition,
reproduction, perception, imagination, desire, and thinking.

DAVID HUME
There is no impression of the “self” that ties our particular impressions together. In other words,
we can never be directly aware of ourselves, only of what we are experiencing at any given
moment. Although the relations between our ideas, feelings, and so on, may be traced through
time by memory, there is no real evidence of any core that connects them. This argument also
applies to the concept of the soul. Hume suggests that the self is just a bundle of perceptions,
like links in a chain. To look for a unifying self beyond those perceptions is like looking for a
chain apart from the links that constitute it. Hume argues that our concept of the self is a result
of our natural habit of attributing unified existence to any collection of associated parts. This
belief is natural
If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same
through the whole course of our lives, since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no
impression constant and invariable”
“beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity”
SOCRATES
according to Socrates, is not to be identified with what we own, with our social status, our
reputation, or even with our body. Instead, Socrates famously maintained that our true self is
our soul.

PAUL CHURCHLAND
Churchland holds to eliminative materialism. Stated simply, eliminative materialism argues that
the ordinary folk psychology of the mind is wrong. It is the physical brain and not the imaginary
mind that gives us our sense of self.
Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is the claim that people's common-sense
understanding of the mind (or folk psychology) is false and that certain classes of mental states
that most people believe in do not exist. It is amaterialist position in the philosophy of mind.
JOHN LOCKE
According to Locke, personal identity (the self) "depends on consciousness, not on substance"
nor on the soul. We are the same person to the extent that we are conscious of the past and
future thoughts and actions in the same way as we are conscious of present thoughts and
actions.

KANT
In Kant's thought there are two components of the self: 1. inner self 2 . outer self
According to Kant, both of these theories are incomplete when it comes to the self. According to
him, we all have an inner and an outer self which together form our consciousness. The
inner self is comprised of our psychological state and our rational intellect. The
outer self includes our sense and the physical world.
Empirical self consciousness is the term Kant used to describe the inner self.
Kant states that all representational states are in inner sense include all
spatially localized outer objects. The origin or our representations regardless
if they are the product of a priori or outer objects as modifications of the
mind belong to inner sense.

St. agustine
Augustine's sense of self is his relation to God, both in his recognition of God's love and his
response to it—achieved through self-presentation, then self-realization. Augustine believed
one could not achieve inner peace without finding God's love. Augustine's sense of self is his
relation to God, both in his recognition of God's love and his response to it—achieved
through self-presentation, then self-realization. Augustine believed one could not achieve
inner peace without finding God's love.

MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Maurice Merleau-Ponty believed the physical body to be an important part of what makes up
the subjectiveself. This concept stands in contradiction to rationalism and empiricism.
Rationalism asserts that reason and mental perception, rather than physical senses and
experience, are the basis of knowledge and self.

SIGMUND FUED
Freud’s view of the self was multitiered, divided among the conscious, preconscious,
and unconscious
Sigmund Freud has claimed that both the conscious self and the unconscious self exist. According
to Freud, the unconscious self is the causal explanation for the conscious self. Freud uses the
unconscious self as both purposes (actions) and causes (neuroses), which creates confusion. Freud
also uses the unconscious as both an explanation (neuroses) and a description
Self in Eastern traditions
In spirituality, and especially nondual, mystical and eastern meditative traditions, the human being is
often conceived as being in the illusion of individual existence, and separateness from other aspects
of creation. This "sense of doership" or sense of individual existence is that part which believes it is
the human being, and believes it must fight for itself in the world, is
ultimately unaware and unconscious of its own true nature. The ego is often associated
with mind and the sense of time, which compulsively thinks in order to be assured of its future
existence, rather than simply knowing its own self and the present.
The spiritual goal of many traditions involves the dissolving of the ego, allowing self-knowledge of
one's own true nature to become experienced and enacted in the world. This is variously known
as enlightenment, nirvana, presence, and the "here and now".