Formation of the Subject—Essays in Honor of Carol Newsom’s 70th Birthday

Abstract

This thematic issue of Dead Sea Discoveries addresses a fundamental issue in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, namely, the formation of the subject. Must there be a subject at all? Or is it, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words, “A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar”? The subject is that which can ascribe predicates to itself but is not itself predicable of anything else. Through such grammatical characterization, one might seek to give as neutral and as broad as possible an account of what has been conceptualized as the rational soul, the self, the mind, the agent, etc. This philosophical conception can be sharpened by philological, historical and anthropological questions: how does the subject change from one culture to another through translation, and from one period to another through commentary? Philosophers and cultural historians have pointed out that the new scientific worldview that emerged in the early modern period was accompanied by a new understanding of the human self, or the subject. This notion of a rational subject that is entirely separate from physical matter finds expression in RenéDescartes’s “discovery” of the thinking “I” in hisMeditations (1641). Shortly after Descartes, we find the first explicit formulation of a self-reflexive subject in John Locke’s Essay onHumanUnderstanding (1690). In the 20th century, the philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the subject has come to be identified