自我的想法在西方哲学以及印度和其他主要传统中起着核心作用。可以看出三种主要的自我观点。一个人从康德的理性自我概念出发，另一个概念来自亚里士多德血统的所谓同质经济学理论。这两种观点都将第一人的独立性从其生物和社会环境理论化。与此相反，人们提出了一种将自我视为在某种环境中有机发展的观点。自我的概念在大多数哲学分支中起着核心作用。例如，在形而上学中，自我被视为探究的起点（在经验主义和理性主义传统中）或作为其调查最值得和最具挑战性的实体（苏格拉底哲学）。在伦理和政治哲学中，自我是解释意志自由和个人责任的关键概念。在笛卡尔的十七世纪，自我的概念在西方传统中占据了中心位置。笛卡尔强调了第一个人的自主权：无论我生活的世界是什么样的，我都能意识到我的存在。换句话说，对于笛卡尔来说，我自己思想的认知基础与其生态关系无关;性别，种族，社会地位，成长等因素都与捕捉自我观念无关。关于这一主题的这种观点将对未来几个世纪产生重大影响。以最激进和最吸引人的方式发展笛卡尔观点的作者是康德。根据康德的说法，每个人都是一个自主的人，能够设想超越任何生态关系（习俗，成长，性别，种族，社会地位，情感……）的行动方案。这种对自我自治的概念将会发挥作用。在制定人权方面发挥核心作用：每个人都有权享有这种权利，正是因为每个人的自尊得到尊重，因为它是一个自主的代理人。在过去的两个世纪中，康德的观点在几个不同的版本中都有所下降;它们构成了一个最强大，最有趣的理论核心之一，它将自我的核心作用归于自我。所谓的同质经济学观点将每个人视为一个个体代理人，其主要（或者，在一些极端版本中，唯一的）行动角色是自身利益。因此，在这种观点下，人类的自主权最能体现在满足自己欲望的过程中。在这种情况下，对欲望起源的分析可能会鼓励考虑生态因素，基于同质经济学的自我理论的焦点将每个代理人视为一个孤立的偏好系统，而不是与其环境相结合的系统。
The idea of a self plays a central role in Western philosophy as well as in the Indian and other major traditions. Three main types of views of the self can be discerned. One moves from Kant’s conception of rationally autonomous self, another from the so-called homo-economicus theory, of Aristotelian descent. Both those types of views theorize the independency of the first person from its biological and social environment. Against those, a perspective that sees the self as organically developing within a certain environment has been proposed. The idea of the self covers a central role in most philosophical branches. For instance, in metaphysics, the self has been seen as the starting point of inquiry (both in the empiricist and rationalist traditions) or as the entity whose investigation is most deserving and challenging (Socratic philosophy). In ethics and political philosophy, the self is the key concept to explain freedom of the will as well as individual responsibility. It is in the seventeenth century, with Descartes, that the idea of the self takes a central place in the Western tradition. Descartes stressed the autonomy of the first person: I can realize that I am existing regardless of what the world I live in is like. In other words, for Descartes the cognitive foundation of my own thinking is independent of its ecological relationships; factors such as gender, race, social status, upbringing are all irrelevant to capture the idea of the self. This perspective on the topic will have crucial consequences for the centuries to come. The author that developed the Cartesian perspective in the most radical and appealing way is Kant. According to Kant, each person is an autonomous being capable of envisaging courses of action that transcend any ecological relationship (customs, upbringing, gender, race, social status, emotional situation …) Such a conception of the autonomy of the self will then play a central role in the formulation of human rights: each and every human being is entitled to such rights precisely because of the respect that each human self merits in as much as it is an autonomous agent. Kantian perspectives have been declined in several different version over the past two centuries; they constitute one of the strongest and most interesting theoretical core attributing a central role to the self. The so-called homo-economicus view sees each human as an individual agent whose primary (or, in some extreme versions, sole) role for action is self-interest. Under this perspective, then, humans’ autonomy is best expressed in the quest to fulfill one’s own desires. While in this case, an analysis of the origin of desires may encourage the consideration of ecological factors, the focus of theories of the self based on homo-economicus see each agent as an isolated system of preferences, rather than one integrated with its environment.