This chapter contains sections titled: Interests and Obligations Self‐Knowledge Moral Development Through Humility, Courage, and Wisdom Character and the Common Good Further Down the Road Notes.

When one is asked "What is the most important moral principle in ancient philosophy?" the immediate answer is not "Take care of oneself" but the Delphic principle gnōthi sauton ("Know thyself"). (Foucault, TS, 19)I can't as yet "know myself," as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. (Plato, Phaedrus, 230a)I certainly do not yet know myself, but whithersoever the wind, as it were, of (...) the argument blows, there lies our course. (Plato, Republic, 394d). (shrink)

There is a perennial and universal concern about the "self." The question of "who I am" is a necessary step on the path of self-awakening. The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" was inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and has been widely praised. Within the philosophical scope of the "self," the problem of personal persistence or personal identity has attracted a great deal of attention and has been discussed extensively in the (...) Western philosophical tradition. The problem is as follows: how can we ensure that those "I"s that exist at different times, play different roles, present different appearances, and have different thoughts are the same person? For example, I am a scholar; I am a... (shrink)

To be told, ‘know thyself’ is to be told that I don't know myself yet: it carries the assumption that I am in some sense distracted from what or who I actually am, that I am in error or at least ignorance about myself. It thus further suggests that my habitual stresses, confusions and frustrations are substantially the result of failure or inability to see what is most profoundly true of me: the complex character of my injuries or traumas, the (...) distinctive potential given me by my history and temperament. I conceal my true feelings from my knowing self; I am content to accept the ways in which other people define me, and so fail to ‘take my own authority’ and decide for myself who or what I shall be. The therapy-orientated culture of the North Atlantic world in the past couple of decades has increasingly taken this picture as foundational, looking to ‘self-discovery’ or ‘self-realization’ as the precondition of moral and mental welfare. And the sense of individual alienation from a true and authoritative selfhood mirrors the political struggle for the right of hitherto disadvantaged groups, especially non-white and non-male, to establish their own self-definition. The rhetoric of discovering a true but buried identity spreads over both private and political spheres. The slogan of the earliest generation of articulate feminists, ‘The personal is the political’, expresses the recognition of how this connection might be made. (shrink)

Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge takes the reader on tour of the nature, value, and limits of self-knowledge. Mitchell S. Green calls on classical sources like Plato and Descartes, 20th-century thinkers like Freud, recent developments in neuroscience and experimental psychology, and even Buddhist philosophy to explore topics at the heart of who we are. The result is an unvarnished look at both the achievements and drawbacks of the many attempts to better know one's own self. Key topics (...) in this volume include: Knowledge - what it means to know, the link between wisdom and knowledge, and the value of living an "examined life" Personal identity - questions of dualism, bodily continuity, and personhood The unconscious - including the kind posited by psychoanalysis as well as the form proposed by recent research on the so-called adaptive unconscious Free will - if we have it, and the recent arguments from neuroscience challenging it Self-misleading - the ways we willfully deceive ourselves, and how this relates to empathy, peer disagreement, implicit bias, and intellectual humility Experimental psychology - considerations on the automaticity of emotion and other cognitive processes, and how they shape us This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free 'Know Thyself' MOOC created through collaboration of the University of Connecticut's Project on Humility and Conviction in Public Life, and the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre, and hosted on the Coursera platform. The book is also suitable as a text for interdisciplinary courses in the philosophy of mind or self-knowledge, and is highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating topic. (shrink)

In this paper, we suggest that personalized LLMs trained on information written by or otherwise pertaining to an individual could serve as artificial moral advisors (AMAs) that account for the dynamic nature of personal morality. These LLM-based AMAs would harness users’ past and present data to infer and make explicit their sometimes-shifting values and preferences, thereby fostering self-knowledge. Further, these systems may also assist in processes of self-creation, by helping users reflect on the kind of person they want to be (...) and the actions and goals necessary for so becoming. The feasibility of LLMs providing such personalized moral insights remains uncertain pending further technical development. Nevertheless, we argue that this approach addresses limitations in existing AMA proposals reliant on either predetermined values or introspective self-knowledge. (shrink)

The acquisition of self-knowledge is often described as one of the main goals of philosophical inquiry. At the same time, some sort of self-knowledge is often regarded as a necessary condition of our being a human agent or human subject. Thus self-knowledge is taken to constitute both the beginning and the end of humans' search for wisdom, and as such it is intricately bound up with the very idea of philosophy. Not surprisingly therefore, the Delphic injunction 'Know thyself' has fascinated (...) philosophers of different times, backgrounds, and tempers. But how can we make sense of this imperative? What is self-knowledge and how is it achieved? What are the structural features that distinguish self-knowledge from other types of knowledge? What role do external, second- and third-personal, sources of knowledge play in the acquisition of self-knowledge? How can we account for the moral impact ascribed to self-knowledge? Is it just a form of anthropological knowledge that allows agents to act in accordance with their aims? Or, does self-knowledge ultimately ennoble the self of the subjects having it? Finally, is self-knowledge, or its completion, a goal that may be reached at all? The book addresses these questions in fifteen chapters covering approaches of many philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Edmund Husserl or Elisabeth Anscombe. The short reflections inserted between the chapters show that the search for self-knowledge is an important theme in literature, poetry, painting and self-portraiture from Homer. (shrink)

In this book, the first systematic study of Socrates' reflections on self-knowledge, Christopher Moore examines the ancient precept 'Know yourself' and, drawing on Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and others, reconstructs and reassesses the arguments about self-examination, personal ideals, and moral maturity at the heart of the Socratic project. What has been thought to be a purely epistemological or metaphysical inquiry turns out to be deeply ethical, intellectual, and social. Knowing yourself is more than attending to your beliefs, discerning the (...) structure of your soul, or recognizing your ignorance - it is constituting yourself as a self who can be guided by knowledge toward the good life. This is neither a wholly introspective nor a completely isolated pursuit: we know and constitute ourselves best through dialogue with friends and critics. This rich and original study will be of interest to researchers in the philosophy of Socrates, selfhood, and ancient thought. (shrink)

In this introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, we provide an overview of the promise and problems of connecting philosophy and psychoanalysis through a focus on the age-old theme central to both disciplines, 'know thyself'.

This article aims to describe the mind/ body problem from an Eastern philosophy point of view addressing firstly Kyudo, the Japanese martial art of archery; and secondly the Western philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Ethics is, in Western philosophy, what deals with the way we take decisions and act upon them. Decisions and actions consider rationality and intuition but seldom the body’s own rationality and intuition —which Kyudo exercises. We can find in Deleuze’s philosophy important concepts to better understand this: difference, repetition, (...) chaos, identity, energy, force, stage and micro-perceptions. To what extent can the dominant Eastern thought approach on the mind/ body topic be effective to fulfill the Ancient Greek aphorism «Know yourself» (γνθι σεαυτν) inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi? (shrink)

Modern skepticism can be usefully divided into two camps: the Cartesian and the Humean.1 Cartesian skepticism is a matter of a theoretical doubt that has little or no practical import in our everyday lives. Its employment concerns whether or not we can achieve a special kind of certain knowledge – something Descartes calls “scientia” 2—that is far removed from our everyday aims or standards of epistemic appraisal. Alternatively, Humean skepticism engages the ancient skeptical concern with whether we have good (...) reason, or any reason at all, for our beliefs, including the common or garden beliefs that are presupposed in our ordinary practical affairs. On this traditional conception, philosophical doubt is a projection of everyday doubt and the lessons of the study are potentially lessons for the street. In this paper I shall focus on the Humean strain of skepticism whose focus concerns whether we have adequate reasons for our beliefs. Henceforth when I speak of skepticism it is this variety of skepticism that I am primarily referring to.3 I want to relate skepticism, so understood, to two kinds of self-knowledge. I shall argue that the failure of past solutions and dissolutions of skepticism to provide a satisfying response to the skeptic can be accounted for in terms of two stances that we can take towards our own.. (shrink)

At the entrance of the Temple of Delphi, the inscription possibly best known in the history of ideas warned about the importance of self-knowledge. In turn, this inscription is philosophically unfolded by the argument that one can only know oneself who cares, since caring is already in itself, to know oneself. Accordingly, many of the ancient medical practices recommended healing through the word. However, only with the advent of clinical hypnosis has this practice recovered, which in theoretical (...) terms seems to run counter to the main lines of the philosophy of mind, whether from the physicalist or the dualistic point of view. In this essay, we will try to show to what extent the concepts of caring and mind can be compatible according to these areas. (shrink)

At times, an individual in modernity can feel dehumanised by work, by administration, by technology, and by political power. This experience of being dehumanised can take the individual to an existential awareness of the priority of existence over essence. But what does this existential experience mean? Are there ways in which this experience can reconnect the individual to her being human, or to her being part of humanity? Any such reconnection is further complicated by the suspicion that universal presuppositions (...) concerning ‘humanity’ or ‘human being’ or ‘humanism’ carry pretensions of imperialist grandeur that must be challenged. How, then, might one proceed to connect existential vertigo with a culture of humanism that, while resisting such pretensions, nevertheless can find meaning for the dehumanised individual? In what follows I argue that a concept of modern metaphysics, with an aporetic logic of subjective experience, can carry this reconnection of the I and the We, offering meaning not in the resolution of their opposition, but in learning that the meaning of their opposition, and the meaning of humanity, is learning, is our education. I argue that it is only within modern educational metaphysics that humanity and the individual Know Thyself. (shrink)

At First, the article analyses Hamann’s path to self-knowledge and self-love as a path of Socratic ignorance, which is indeed the highest form of knowledge. For Hamann Socrates is the predecessor of Christ, and Socratic ignorance (I know that I know nothing) is the path to divinization. Subsequently, it is pointed out, how Hryhorii Skovoroda explains the path of self-knowledge and self-love. To illustrate this thought, he makes use of the Ovidian Narcissus myth. Concerning the figure of Narcissus, Skovoroda distinguishes (...) the following three aspects: 1. The Egyptian Narcissus, 2. The Hebraic Narcissus and 3. The Christian Narcissus, i.e. Jesus Christ. These three aspects and corresponding assertions of the Bible designate Skovoroda’s path to divinization. Finally, it points out similarities between Hamann’s and Skovoroda’s understanding of self-knowing and self-love and their fundamental impact for the philosophy of Franz von Baader and his criticism of modern subjectivism. (shrink)

Self-Knowledge: An Essay in Social Personalism proposes that social Personalism can best provide for self-knowledge. Thomas O. Buford offers a social personalist understanding of self-knowledge which focuses on the relation of persons to each other and to the Personal, and avoids the impersonalisms that erode the dignity of persons and their moral life which characterize modern life.

I tend to think of myself as bodily. Probably, so do you. Philosophically this takes some explaining. A candidate explanation is this: The bodily self is a physical agent. Knowledge of oneself as bodily is fundamentally knowledge of oneself as agentive; such knowledge is grounded in both experience of oneself as instantiating a bodily structure that affords a limited range of actions; and experience of oneself as a physical agent that tries to perform a limited range of actions over (...) time. By contrast René Descartes famously argued that all self-knowledge is grounded in, and cannot extend beyond, knowledge of oneself as a mental entity. If correct this would preclude the possibility of any knowledge of a bodily self, for such a thing would ex hypothesi not exist. Accordingly, this dissertation serves a dual purpose: to demonstrate why a Cartesian theory of self-knowledge is no threat to an account of bodily self knowledge; and to provide such an account. This dual purpose is achieved over the course of three chapters. The first chapter will set up the remaining two, by introducing the notion of self-identifying judgements, providing an argument in favour of bodily self knowledge on its basis, and noting two failures of this argument in light of a Cartesian response. The second and third chapter are respective attempts to address these two failures. The second chapter is explicitly concerned with the Cartesian, but is overall devoted to giving an account of the relationship between bodily experience and action. The third chapter is more programmatic, comprising a consistent set of suggestions concerning the sense of agency and its role in an account of bodily self knowledge. (shrink)

This article explores the production and consumption of phrenological knowledge for and by middle-class women in the USA during the early and middle decades of the 19th century. At a time when science itself had few boundaries, women became readers, consumers, proselytizers and practitioners of this knowledge system, outside of a scientific academy. This paper argues that phrenological beliefs about sex differences enabled and encouraged women to be users. Phrenology allowed women to negotiate gender and by encouraging followers to ‘know (...) thyself,’ phrenology blurred the lines of expertise, creating a fluid interplay between users and producers of knowledge. This article then shows how categories of women users–practitioners, consumers and feminists–implemented or rejected elements of phrenology as they sought to affirm or amend prescribed gender roles. As the industrial economy seemed to divide public and private, production and consumption, masculine and feminine, phrenology allowed women and men to stand within and between these binaries. At the same time, some women used phrenology to classify themselves and others in a socio-natural hierarchy and further engrained scientific racism in American culture. (shrink)

Following Gilbert Ryle’s arguments, many philosophers took it for granted that someone knows how to do something just in case they have the ability to do it. Within the last couple decades, new intellectualists have challenged this longstanding anti-intellectualist assumption. Their central contention is that mere abilities aren’t on the same rational, epistemic level as know how. My goal is to intellectualize know how without over-intellectualizing it. Intelligent behavior is characteristically flexible or responsive to novelty, and the distinctive feature (...) of creatures who exhibit flexible behavior is their capacity to learn. As it turns out, Ryle already identified a core characteristic of learning shared widely across the animal kingdom from the lowly rat to the top athlete. Taking my cues from Ryle, I argue that know how is successful performance resulting from self-regulated abilities. To regulate an ability is to be disposed to adjust to error and respond to feedback. While regulating sophisticated human abilities often requires propositional knowledge, in many simpler cases it does not. I focus on the navigational know how of rats and honeybees. Although they possess know how, whether they possess propositional knowledge is at best an open question. (shrink)

How do we know when we have imagined something? How do we distinguish our imaginings from other kinds of mental states we might have? These questions present serious, if often overlooked, challenges for theories of introspection and self-knowledge. This paper looks specifically at the difficulties imagination creates for Neo-Expressivist, outward-looking, and inner sense theories of self-knowledge. A path forward is then charted, by considering the connection between the kinds of situations in which we can reliably say that another person is (...) imagining, and those in which we can say the same about ourselves. This view is a variation on the outward-looking approach, and preserves much of the spirit of Neo-Expressivism. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to articulate further what may be called an agency theory of self-knowledge. Many theorists have stressed how important agency is to self- knowledge, and much work has been done drawing connections between the two notions.² However, it has not always been clear what _epistemic_ advantage agency gives us in this area and why it does so. I take it as a constraint on an adequate account of how a subject knows her own mental states (...) and acts, that it construe the known mental states and acts realistically and as independent of their self-ascription, and that it deliver genuine epistemic standing to the knower. The main task of the paper will, then, be to explore how our having rational agency with respect to our mental states may be able to secure genuine epistemic warrant for our self-ascriptions of states or acts independent of the ascriptions. This task will be carried out by focussing on the question of what account we should give of our knowledge of what I call our acts of judging. In the remainder of this section, I will do a little to clarify what is meant by that question. Section 2 will attempt to introduce us to elements of the best way to approach the question by considering some alternative strategies. Section 3 is devoted to forming some idea of what _kind_ of warrant we are looking for when considering how agency might give us self-knowledge. Section 4 aims to present a suggestion as to how agency gives us the kind of warrant identified over our acts of judging. Section 5 deals with some objections. (shrink)

According to inferentialism about self-knowledge of desire, the basic way in which we come to know what we want is through inference. In this paper, I argue that in a wide range of cases of knowing one’s desire, inference is insufficient. In particular, I look at two inferentialist models, one proposed by Krista Lawlor and the other by Alex Byrne and look at the challenges that they face in securing safe self-ascriptions. In response to these difficulties, I argue that (...) we can explain how inferentially based self-ascriptions can be safe when we consider the agent’s role in sustaining their desires through attending and elaborating on the content of desire through imagination. (shrink)

In his book Naturalizing the Mind, Fred Dretske, among other things, gives what he thinks is a naturalist account of what he calls introspective knowledge.1 I shall not quarrel with his labels; I shall quarrel with what he tries to sell by using them. For him, introspective knowledge is “the mind’s direct knowledge of itself”,2 and he concentrates on knowledge of one’s own current mental occurrences, especially those which belong to the realm of sensory perception. An example he discusses is (...) the knowledge somebody has who looks at something and sees it as blue, and thereby knows that he is, as Dretske puts it, “representing” it as blue. I shall stick to this example. Harvey is looking at my shirt, and he thereby comes to know that he is representing it as blue. Dretske wants to answer the question: What is really happening when Harvey acquires this piece of introspective knowledge? Let me first give, in a very rough way, what I take to be Dretske’s basic idea. Introspective knowledge is not acquired by anything like looking inside oneself. One looks in the same direction as one does when one is acquiring “extraspective” knowledge. Harvey doesn’t first look at my shirt, saying “Uhuh, this shirt looks blue, but now I’d like to find out how I am representing it”, and then turns to look at something else in order to find out what the colour is he is representing the shirt to have. Harvey only looks at the shirt, when he acquires this item of introspective knowledge. In looking at that shirt, he acquires all the information he needs for acquiring the knowledge about himself that he is representing it as blue. The eyes’ job is done. The rest is exploiting that very information, not acquiring any new information. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 11, Issue 2, pp 117 - 148 The paper examines the problem of self-knowledge from the perspectives of Plotinus and the Indian Advaita school. Analyzing the subject-object relation, I show that according to both Plotinus and Advaita thinkers, full self-knowledge demands complete absence of otherness. Plotinus argues that if self-consciousness is divided into subject-object relation then one will know oneself as contemplated but not as contemplating and no real self-knowledge obtains in this case. Śaṅkara, who constitutes an (...) important representative of Advaita thought, points out that the self cannot know itself as an object because what is called an object to be known becomes established when it is separated from the self, the subject. I argue that at the level of the One, similar to the state of _ātman_ consciousness in Advaita framework, the soul experiences itself in expansive non-dual consciousness. Lastly, I examine the role of non-duality as the foundation of knowledge. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In the epistemology of self-knowledge, Inferentialism is the view that one’s current mental states are normally known to one through inferences from evidence. This view is often taken to conflict with widespread claims about normally-acquired self-knowledge, namely that it is privileged (essentially more secure than knowledge of others’ minds) and peculiar (obtained in a way that fundamentally differs from how others know your mind). In this paper I argue that Inferentialism can be reconceived so as to no longer conflict with (...) these claims. On a positive framing, Inferentialism earns a seat at the table alongside other theories of self-knowledge that take its potentially privileged and peculiar status seriously. On a less positive framing, Inferentialism’s plausibility now hinges on the plausibility of viewing self-knowledge as at least peculiar, and perhaps as privileged as well. (shrink)

I argue that a variety of influential accounts of self-knowledge are flawed by the assumption that all immediate, authoritative knowledge of our own present mental states is of one basic kind. I claim, on the contrary, that a satisfactory account of self-knowledge must recognize at least two fundamentally different kinds of self-knowledge: an active kind through which we know our own judgments, and a passive kind through which we know our sensations. I show that the former kind of self-knowledge is (...) in an important sense fundamental, since it is intimately connected with the very capacity for rational reflection, and since it must be present in any creature that understands the first-person pronoun. Moreover, I suggest that these thoughts about self-knowledge have a Kantian provenance. (shrink)

This paper addresses an important yet neglected existential issue sometimes faced by persons with bipolar disorder (BD): confusion about the extent to which what one is like is influenced by BD. Although such confusion is common in psychiatric illnesses, BD raises idiosyncratic difficulties due to its intricate interactions with personality, cognition and behavior. The fluctuating mood phases of BD can generate inconsistency in one's self-experience and sense of self. One way to resolve this confusion would be to coherently account for (...) BD within one's overall self-concept. To facilitate this task, this paper introduces a heuristic taxonomy of different relationships wherein BD can be viewed in light of self-related beliefs. The relationships are as follows: (1) BD contributes to the self, (2) BD scaffolds the self, (3) BD gradually becomes part of the self and (4) BD is not part of the ‘real self’. As the individual presentation of BD varies extensively, the type of relationship one feels holds true depends on one's personal experience of managing and living with the disorder. These relationships act as an organizing framework for one's self-related beliefs about how to account for the effects of BD on personality, behavior, cognitive patterns and other self-expressions. (shrink)

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] idea of this book is to closely examine all passages where Socrates talks about the Delphic precept, ‘Know Thyself’, and see what picture of self-knowledge emerges. Given that Socrates is a key figure in the transmission of this precept, it is very likely that such a project leads to significant results.After (...) a discussion of the inscription itself, Moore discusses the relevant passages in the Charmides, the Alcibiabes I, the Phaedrus, the Philebus, Xenophon's Memorabilia, and other texts. A detailed discussion of the Apology is missing; however, it might have been helpful. There are far more things to be praised than questioned in the book. In its details, it is rich, well crafted, and largely... (shrink)

Do you like puzzles, coding, and taking things apart? Do you write stories, act in plays, slay at Wordle? The things you are good at are clues to how your brain works. Are you good at math? Working with your hands? Are you a neat freak or a big mess? With her knack for making science easy to understand, Temple Grandin explains different types of thinkers: verbal thinkers who are good with language, and visual thinkers who think in pictures (...) and patterns. You will discover all kinds of minds and how we need to work together to create solutions to help solve real-world problems. (shrink)

He tried to look into her face, to find out what she thought, but she was smelling the lilac and the lilies of the valley and did not know herself what she was thinking—what she ought to say or do.OblomovMuch of modern and contemporary philosophy of mind in the ‘analytic’ tradition has presupposed, since Descartes, what might be called a realist view about the mind and the mental. According to this view there are independently existing, determinate items that are the (...) truth-conferrers of our ascriptions of mental predicates. The view is also a cognitivist one insofar as it holds that when we correctly ascribe such a predicate to an individual the correctness consists in the discovery of a determinate fact of the matter about the state the individual is in—a state which is somehow cognized by the ascriber. Disputes have arisen about the nature of the truth-conferrers and about the status and the nature of the individual's own authority about the state he is in. A dissenting position in philosophy of mind would have to be handled carefully. It would, most importantly, need to allow for the objectivity of ascriptions of mental predicates at least insofar as it made sense to reject some and accept others on appropriate grounds. Perhaps such a position in the philosophy of mind can be likened in at least one way to what David Wiggins has characterized as a doctrine of ‘cognitive underdetermination’ about moral or practical judgments. (shrink)

Dorit Bar-On develops and defends a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, she offers original and systematic answers to many long-standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. We are all very good at telling what states of mind we are in at a given moment. When it comes to our own present states of mind, what we say goes; an (...) avowal such as "I'm feeling so anxious" or "I'm thinking about my next trip to Paris," it is typically supposed, tells it like it is. But why is that? Why should what I say about my present mental states carry so much more weight than what others say about them? Why should avowals be more immune to criticism and correction than other claims we make? And if avowals are not based on any evidence or observation, how could they possibly express our knowledge of our own present mental states? Bar-On proposes a Neo-Expressivist view according to which an avowal is an act through which a person directly expresses, rather than merely reports, the very mental condition that the avowal ascribes. She argues that this expressivist idea, coupled with an adequate characterization of expression and a proper separation of the semantics of avowals from their pragmatics and epistemology, explains the special status we assign to avowals. As against many expressivists and their critics, she maintains that such an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states. The view that emerges preserves many insights of the most prominent contributors to the subject, while offering a new perspective on our special relationship to our own minds. (shrink)

The paper pursues the question: what makes self‐knowledge of our intentional states special, what makes it different from other kinds of knowledge? It does so by contrasting a ’constitutive’ view of self‐knowledge with a perceptual model of self‐knowledge, and claims that if the former can be shown to be plausible, that will establish the special character of self‐knowledge. It then follows Crispin Wright in setting up a biconditional, which links the first‐order and second‐order intentional states as (...) a prima facie mark of the constitutive view of self‐knowledge. In the rest of the paper, however, a quite different understanding of the biconditional is provided from the one in Crispin Wright's work. The biconditional is given support by a normative conception of agency owing to Strawson's conception of freedom, and a normative conception of intentionality. The overarching claim of the paper is that the special character of self‐knowledge is of a piece with the special nature of the agent's or first person point of view, and at bottom, both self‐knowledge and the point of view of agency are of a piece with the irreducibility of norms and values to states of nature, as natural sciences study them. (shrink)

In this dissertation I re-assert the significance of the ancient Greek aphorism - ‘know thyself’: I identify the individual human self as the starting point and ubiquitous preamble of all epistemology and ontology. I argue that the primary feature of the way we find ourselves living is as an individual conscious bodily subject and this is the locus or starting point of all our possible knowledge. Although we find ourselves as individual subjects of experience and action we are not (...) isolated; rather we are always already with others as part of a wider world. I therefore propose a proto-ontology of ‘me, others, and world’ with corresponding interlocking modes of ‘individuality, intersubjectivity, and interdependence’. I argue that our direct knowing-by-being of our selves reveals some further primary facts about ourselves in terms of unity, compositionality, temporality, judgment, agency, and teleology. I acknowledge the phenomenological concept of pre-reflective self-awareness as an expression of the universal individuality of experience. However while some phenomenologists want to confine this mineness to the way that experience occurs, I argue that this mineness points to a more substantial knowing of ourselves as bodily subjects or selves. I claim that this human centered starting point becomes relevant or critical when we try to construct - or claim to have knowledge of - universal metaphysical theories such as scientism, which purports to be able to give a complete physicalist scientific picture of the world that sees nothing special in our individual first person perspectives. I argue that purely third personal objective scientific metaphysical theories have a blind spot in accounting for consciousness, which is what makes possible any theory whatsoever. Also since the twentieth century the results of physical science itself, notably quantum physics, seem, on some interpretations, to point to a reality that is not independent of individual observers. To alleviate these problems, I argue for a re-ordering of the priority of self and science. I reject strong forms of scientific realism and scientism in favour of a view that understands science as just one form of our human exploration of our world. Our knowing-by-being of ourselves is existentially and epistemically prior to any third-person knowledge and reflects our human cosmic significance as sources of explanatory knowledge and judgment. However, because our experience of ourselves is from within a wider world we should not expect to have a complete ontological picture of everything. Our limited ontological knowledge leaves us in a situation of subject and object duality but this is not a matter of dividing the world; rather it is a matter of recognizing our own situation. This can be seen as limiting, in that we are not in a position to know everything: but a proper understanding of ourselves liberates us from universalist doctrines and allows us to know ourselves as a source of nature’s self understanding from within. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Scholarly interest in Margaret Cavendish's philosophical views has steadily increased over the past decade, but her epistemology has received little attention, and no consensus has emerged; Cavendish has been characterized as a skeptic, as a rationalist, as presenting an alternative epistemology to both rationalism and empiricism, and even as presenting no clear theory of knowledge at all. This paper concludes that Cavendish was only a modest skeptic, for she believed that humans can achieve knowledge through sensitive and rational perception (...) as well as through self-knowledge and can form probable opinions through reasoning. (shrink)

Ordinarily, if a person produces a nonreflective, ‘unstudied’ self-attribution of a present mental state – an avowal – we do not presume that they have produced the avowal on some specific epistemic basis; and we do not expect them to know how they know the self-attribution to be true. This no-‘how’ character of basic self-knowledge is puzzling, given that we regard avowals as manifesting factual, and indeed privileged, knowledge. I am here interested in views that accommodate both the baseless, no-‘how’ (...) and the factual, privileged character of basic self-knowledge. I argue that leading constitutivist views, which embrace both, fail properly to meet the doxastic (as opposed to justificatory) requirement on basic self-knowledge, thereby failing to preserve its genuinely factual character. I then argue that an alternative, neo-expressivist approach is better placed to meet the doxastic requirement, as well as being at least as well-placed as constitutivist views to address the justificatory requirement on baseless self-knowledge. (shrink)

The similarities between the Copernican and existentialist approach to self-knowledge can be clearly summarized by the combined effect they have on the correspondence model of self-knowledge. The self-knower who holds that knowledge conforms to its object is not only wrong but deceived if his goal is the complete one-to-one correspondence between, on the one hand, objectively validated propositions, and on the other an independently existing, recalcitrant reality (the Self). Both Kant and Sartre hold that we can know ourselves in terms (...) of appearances or quasi-objects, but they both deny that we can know what we “really” are over and above the empirical, contingent and finite knowledge we have. For Kant, this is because we are, most fundamentally, something unknowable; for Sartre, it is because we are, most fundamentally, nothing. In both cases, the self we purport to know is in an important sense other than itself: in saying “I,” more is being said than we know — and less. The “I” is spoken only through and across that which is not “I.”. (shrink)

Plato's First Alcibiades was the recognised introduction to the dialogues of Plato in late antiquity, because it addresses the important question of the nature of the self. Only by discovering this can we understand the perspective from which we view the rest of reality. It was also considered as a necessary first step in our pursuit of happiness, for unless we know what we are we cannot know what will bring about our fulfilment - and without the fulfilment of our (...) true nature we cannot be happy. As a key to human understanding and happiness, the dialogue is as important today as it was in antiquity. Approximate Stephanus pagination accompanies the text. Added to this dialogue, in the form of additional notes and an introduction, is much of Proclus' Commentary written on the understanding that "it will be found by those who are deeply skilled in the philosophy of Plato, that each of his dialogues contains that which the universe contains." The Commentary reveals to the thoughtful student the depths of this important dialogue, its universal form, and its living heart - which is the quickening of the soul by the touch of divine vision. Three modern essays, written with the newcomer in mind, accompany the text and commentary: A Survey of the Soul and Socrates as the Symbolic Daemon of the Alcibiades by Tim Addey, and Possibilities of Self by Guy Wyndham-Jones. (shrink)

The burden of this article is that although the idea of `the self'which Galen Strawson decribes in his target article is initially very attractive, it eventually doesn't work. There is a lot of competition for a `pole position'notion -- `human', `person', psuche, `soul', even `sake'-- and the idea of `self'does not seem to deserve the prize. What Strawson wants to do with the notion of a `self'can be done equally well, and more economically, by the first-person pronoun. A question raised (...) repeatedly is: `What is a self worth wanting?'Perhaps the greatest area of disagreement with Strawson's article is with his idea that `the self'needs to have little or nothing to do with time-related plans and emotions: guilt and remorse; pride; hope and expectation; career choices... even such apparently mundane things as pension-plans -- in fact, any long-term forward- or backward-looking psychological phenomena. The question of realism is pressed. (shrink)

Early in the Phaedrus, Socrates tells his interlocutor that he does not have time to formulate naturalistic reinterpretations of old stories, because he is not yet able, according to the Delphic inscription, to know myself. Indeed, it appears laughable to me for one who is still ignorant of this to examine alien things. … [So] I examine not them but myself: whether I happen to be some wild animal more multiply twisted and filled with desire than Typhon, or a gentler, (...) simpler animal having by nature a share in a divine fate. (shrink)

In this thesis I propose an account of knowledge of one’s own mental states. My goal is set on a unified transparency account of self-knowledge. It is unified, because the proposal will account for the generation of beliefs about mental states of all types, regardless of whether they are propositional, non-propositional, experiential or non-experiential. My account will thereby be applicable to knowledge of any mental state, from beliefs and desires to fears, hopes, and sensations such as pain. Moreover, it will (...) be a transparency account because it holds on to Gareth Evans’s observation that self-ascribing mental states is done by attending outwards instead of inwards. There is a sense in which we attend to the world when we find out whether we believe something, and my proposal aims to capture this intuition. The core idea I am exploring is the following: generally, when one produces a first-order mental state, one also forms a corresponding, dispositional second-order belief about that state. Both attitudes share elements of their production, which ensures reliability while retaining fallibility. For instance, when you form a belief ‘there is a red car’ by perceiving a red car, you also generate the dispositional belief ‘I believe that there is a red car,’ if everything goes right. I argue that almost all features that make self-knowledge special can be explained with this basic idea. The assumption that the production of a first-order mental state and a second-order belief about the state go hand in hand has surprising explanatory power. Moreover, there are at least no obvious reasons why the assumption should be ruled out. The upshot will be a view that we should take seriously as a contender for an explanation of self-knowledge. I will not be able to conclusively show that it is the best explanation, but I argue that it is one worth thinking about. The thesis is structured in three parts. The first part focuses on the phenomenon of self-knowledge and the transparency idea. These chapters serve as the setup for my later proposed view. Chapter 1 and 2 discuss what exactly we want to explain when we say that we aim to explain self-knowledge. I thereby provide an overview of the conceptual landscape of self-knowledge and argue that we should understand the peculiarity of self-knowledge in terms of features of belief and belief-formation. Moreover, I commit myself to the view that the peculiarity has something to do with our cognitive access to mental states and relate that to the goal of a unified account of self-knowledge. Chapter 3 discusses how we ought to understand the other qualification of my goal: a transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide an overview of transparency accounts in the literature and lay out the path to avoid common problems of transparency accounts. In the second part I propose the single process model of self-knowledge as a unified, transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide the core principles of the view and show how it explains the features of self-knowledge I aim to explain. Chapter 4 focuses on attitudes, both propositional and non-propositional. Chapter 5 expands the view to phenomenal states, such as being in pain. The third part connects the epistemological discussion of the single process model to research on cognition. Chapter 6 proposes a cognitive story of predictive processing that is compatible with the single process model. I thereby discuss the plausibility of the predictive processing idea and its empirical support. I provide a predictive processing story of self-knowledge that fits with the single process model of self-knowledge. In chapter 7 I discuss extended mental states. Clark & Chalmers propose that at least some mental states, such as beliefs, can be extended to external devices. Given that my aim is a unified account, I ought to say something about knowledge of these extended beliefs. I argue that they cannot be known by the same processes as non-extended mental states because beliefs about extended beliefs show different features than beliefs about our non-extended states that we formed by introspection. Hence, even if my view cannot account for them this is not a problem, because they are not formed by genuine introspection. Instead, we come to know extended mental states by a distinct process that we might call extended introspection. Finally, chapter 8 provides a brief conclusion of the thesis for and points out some placed that require further development. The account is promising as an explanation of self-belief and self-knowledge, but whether it is correct also depends on future research outside the scope of philosophy. (shrink)

To the Socratic injunction ‘Know Thyself’ one wonders how to respond. Presumably Socrates is asking us to attempt a project at which we are supposed to have some chance of success and this leads one to ask ‘ Can I know myself?’ One is led to ask it, but the question can seem rhetorical. Many would reply that of course one can do this because there is nothing easier for me to know than my own self. I do, therefore I (...) can. I know it simply by being myself. Not only this, one might regard knowledge of oneself as unavoidable so that the answer to the question ‘Can I know myself?’ is ‘Yes’ and the answer to the question ‘Can I avoid knowing myself?’ is ‘No’. Now if we cannot avoid knowing ourselves, if Socrates is asking us to do somethingwhich we inevitably do anyway, then he has certainly earned his reputation for irony. (shrink)

In 1978, Barbara Carper named personal knowing as a fundamental way of knowing in our discipline. By that, she meant the discovery of self‐and‐other, arrived at through reflection, synthesis of perceptions and connecting with what is known. Along with empirics, aesthetics and ethics, personal knowing was understood as an essential attribute of nursing knowledge evolution, setting the context for the nurse to become receptively attentive to and engaged within the interpersonal processes of practice. Although much has been (...) done over the 40 years since Carper described these ways of knowing, and we have seen enormous advances in empirics and ethics, and I would argue even in aesthetics (understanding the subtle craft of nursing in action), personal knowing may not have attracted its fair share of critical unpacking. Further, we see increasing evidence of a distortion on how forms of personal knowledge, including beliefs and attitudes, are being taken up within segments of the profession; these include legitimizing idiosyncratic positionings and, most worrisome, challenges to the idea that there are and ought to be fundamental truths within nursing that stand as central to disciplinary knowledge. In this paper, the author reflects on the confusion that a continued uncritical deference to personal knowing may be creating and the evolving interests it seems to serve. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Augustine’s response to two Socratic statements: his exhortation for us to know ourselves, and his claim that he knows only that he knows nothing. Augustine addresses these statements in many works, but I focus in particular on his discussion of error in Contra Academicos, and his account of self-knowing (and not-knowing) in De Trinitate (DT). -/- For Augustine, error can occur in at least four distinct ways, and one of his main purposes in (...) Contra Academicos is to show that having an overly narrow view of error, focused on only one of those ways—namely, approving a falsehood as a truth—too easily leads to skepticism. He argues instead that erring can be a sin both of commission and of omission, and that failing to assent when one should assent is just as problematic as assenting when one should not. In both Contra Academicos and De Trinitate, Augustine extends his position by exploring the ways in which one can achieve epistemic certainty. But in doing this, he also offers scattered remarks about how one recognizes that one has not yet achieved certain knowledge, and thus about how one can know that one does not know. It is here that Augustine’s views are the most muddled, since he simultaneously claims that we (as humans in this life) are ignorant in many fundamental ways, that knowledge of something requires knowledge of that thing as a whole, and that nevertheless we can know ourselves, which obviously involves knowing that we do not know. It is to this puzzling group of claims that the remainder of the paper is addressed. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Augustine’s response to two Socratic statements: his exhortation for us to know ourselves, and his claim that he knows only that he knows nothing. Augustine addresses these statements in many works, but I focus in particular on his discussion of error in Contra Academicos, and his account of self-knowing (and not-knowing) in De Trinitate (DT). -/- For Augustine, error can occur in at least four distinct ways, and one of his main purposes in (...) Contra Academicos is to show that having an overly narrow view of error, focused on only one of those ways—namely, approving a falsehood as a truth—too easily leads to skepticism. He argues instead that erring can be a sin both of commission and of omission, and that failing to assent when one should assent is just as problematic as assenting when one should not. In both Contra Academicos and De Trinitate, Augustine extends his position by exploring the ways in which one can achieve epistemic certainty. But in doing this, he also offers scattered remarks about how one recognizes that one has not yet achieved certain knowledge, and thus about how one can know that one does not know. It is here that Augustine’s views are the most muddled, since he simultaneously claims that we (as humans in this life) are ignorant in many fundamental ways, that knowledge of something requires knowledge of that thing as a whole, and that nevertheless we can know ourselves, which obviously involves knowing that we do not know. It is to this puzzling group of claims that the remainder of the paper is addressed. (shrink)

The problem of self-knowledge has been thoroughly discussed in the context of traditional epistemology. In parallel to the traditional approach to epistemology, Radically Embodied Cognitive Science (RECS) has emerged in the last 30 years as a genuine contender in its field. According to RECS, the unity of analysis of cognitive processes is the dynamics between brain, body and environment. In this paper, I advance a RECS approach to self-knowledge, which immediately suggests that knowing oneself is a matter of (...) class='Hi'>knowing what one’s body can do. I then turn to resistance training, particularly weightlifting, and argue that it offers a paradigmatic case of self-knowledge in RECS’s terms. More precisely, resistance training allows the trainee to achieve knowledge of themselves in a fundamentally practical manner—and doing so is transformative of the kind of actions they are capable of. (shrink)

You know what someone else is thinking and feeling by observing them. But how do you know what you are thinking and feeling? This is the problem of self-knowledge: Alex Byrne tries to solve it. The idea is that you know this not by taking a special kind of look at your own mind, but by an inference from a premise about your environment.