Cosmopolitan Self

Mitchell Aboulafia is a professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Mediating Self: Mead, Sartre, and Self-Determination and Self-Winding Circle: A Study of Hegel’s System.

"Explicates Mead's concept of the social self. . . . In order to articulate Mead's views, Aboulafia compares his concept of the social self with the understandings of society, self, and politics advanced by such Continental philosophers as Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. . . . Effectively presents the views of the philosophers."--Choice "German philosophers, notably JÜrgen Habermas, have been experimenting for years with hybrid pragmatist transplants. Now, Mitchell Aboulafia demonstrates, in four brisk studies, how to breed an even hardier flora, suited to the continental European climate, from George Herbert Mead's original psychological and political plantings. Aboulafia's work is the start of a promising new season!"-- Joseph Margolis, author of Historied Thought, Constructed World "Aboulafia's beautifully written work makes a major contribution to the ongoing pragmatism revival. He elaborates lucidly and creatively the vital resources that Mead's thought provides for engaging some of the most intensely debated issues and thinkers in contemporary social theory and for moving beyond the modernist-postmodernist divide."--Robert J. Antonio, author of Social Problems: Values and Interests in Conflict "Original, provocative, wide-ranging, and clear, The Cosmopolitan Self raises issues that are central to multiple philosophical traditions and brings those traditions into contact with each other. It stands at the leading edge of a move within philosophy to cross boundaries between intellectual traditions--and thus is not just a book about pluralism but a performance of that pluralism."--John J. Stuhr, author of Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community