Inwardness

Where do we look when we look inward? In what sort of space does our inner life take place? Augustine said that to turn inward is to find oneself in a library of memories, while the Indian Buddhist tradition holds that we are self-illuminating beings casting light onto a world of shadows. And a disquieting set of dissenters has claimed that inwardness is merely an illusionor, worse, a deceit. Jonardon Ganeri explores philosophical reflections from many of the worlds intellectual cultures, ancient and modern, on how each of us inhabits an inner world. In brief and lively chapters, he ranges across an unexpected assortment of diverse thinkers: Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, and Western philosophy and literature from the Upaniads, Socrates, and Avicenna to Borges, Simone Weil, and Rashmon. Ganeri examines the various metaphors that have been employed to explain interiorityshadows and mirrors, masks and disguises, rooms and enclosed spacesas well as the interfaces and boundaries between inner and outer worlds. Written in a cosmopolitan spirit, this book is a thought-provoking consideration of the valueor perilof turning ones gaze inward for all readers who have sought to map the geography of the mind.