IB Philosophy 1.2 the Self and the Other Key Definitions

Anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) is the Buddhist doctrine of not-self: there is no permanent, unified self underlying experience. What we call “the self” is instead a collection of impermanent mental and physical processes with no fixed core.

I-Thou Relation: in Martin Buber's philosophy, the mode of relating in which another person is encountered as a full, irreducible subject rather than an object, in contrast to the I-It relation where the other is reduced to a category or tool.

Inter-subjectivity is the shared domain of experience and meaning between subjects, through which selves come to be constituted through mutual recognition, embodied engagement, and dialogue with others rather than in isolation.

Junzi: the Confucian ideal of the morally exemplary person who embodies virtue through disciplined self-cultivation, defined not by birth or rank but by fully realising the virtues appropriate to each of their relational roles.

Li: in Confucian philosophy, the system of ritual propriety and social norms that govern conduct within the five cardinal relationships, providing the social grammar through which ren is expressed and sustained.

Moral responsibility is the status of being worthy of praise or blame for one's actions, typically requiring that the agent acted freely, with knowledge of what they were doing, and with the capacity to have done otherwise.

Personhood is the status of being a person, typically defined by possessing certain capacities such as self-consciousness, rationality, moral agency, or social recognition, though the criteria vary across philosophical traditions.

Problem of other minds: the philosophical question of whether and how we can know that other beings besides ourselves possess conscious experiences, given that we can only directly access our own mental states.

Psychological continuity, associated with John Locke, is the view that personal identity consists in overlapping chains of memory, consciousness, and psychological connection linking earlier and later stages of a person's life, prioritising mental over physical continuity as the criterion of personal identity.

Reductionism about the self is the view that the self is not a separately existing entity but can be reduced to patterns of sense experience and bodily states. Ayer argues that 'I' is a logical construction rather than a reference to a soul or substance, drawing on Hume's bundle theory.

Relational Self: the philosophical view that personal identity is not a pre-given substance but is constituted through relations to others from the outset, so that selfhood and otherness are co-constitutive rather than prior and independent categories.

Ren is the central Confucian virtue, variously translated as benevolence, humaneness, or goodness, representing the highest moral quality attainable through sustained self-cultivation. It is expressed as genuine concern for the wellbeing of others within concrete relationships rather than abstract universal love.

Solipsism is the philosophical position that only one's own mind can be known to exist, leaving all other minds and the external world as potentially unverifiable constructions of one's own experience.

Substantialist account: the view that the self is a genuine, persisting entity that unifies experience over time, contrasting with deflationary accounts that reduce the self to simpler processes or deny its existence altogether.