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1. The consciousness of the continuous change of human body and spirit in the West has been expressed by Plato with Diotima’s words in Symposium: “a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation—hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul […]” (Jowett’s translation; lines 207D–208C). More broadly, as it pertains to the history of modern thought, several Western thinkers, such as Montaigne, Locke, Hume, Parfit, and Nietzsche, have expressed serious reservations about the role of memory, the continuity in a person’s life and changes of their identity. No less skeptical on the identity of the self are the postmodern thinkers like Whitehead. In a further study, I will take into consideration Pirandello’s dramas and novels on the disintegration of individual identities and the loss of one’s “self” in the chaotic flow of existence, as well as the continuous changes caused by institutions, social roles, one’s own and others’ beliefs and illusions. For a discussion on the psychological definition of “person” and “self,” see Bergner, “What Is a Person? What Is the Self?.” McCormick (“The Concept of the Self in Political Thought,” 689–725) presents a short historical survey of different kinds of political individuality in the West. On the concept of self in Chinese civilization, see Ames, “The Meaning of Body in Classical Chinese Philosophy”; Ames et al., Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice; K. Lai, Learning from Chinese Philosophies; Shun and Wong, Confucian Ethics; and Slingerland, “Conceptions of the Self in the Zhuangzi,” 322–342. Further problems come from possible equivocations due to the rendering traditional Confucian concepts with Western terms and the hybridization of notions belonging to different traditions. See 124n18 in chapter 6 of this volume.

2. See respectively Metzinger, Being No One, 1; Neisser, “Five Kinds of Self-knowledge,” 37–59; Doris, Lack of Character; and Harman, “The Nonexistence of Character Traits,” 223–226; and Velleman, “The Self as Narrator,” 56–76. For multidimension selves, see Schlicht et al., “Self as Cultural Construct?,” 688; and Meyers, “Decentralizing Autonomy: Five Faces of Selfhood,” 27–55. For a psychological and more empirical