Authority and estrangement : an essay on self-knowledge

✍ Scribed by Moran, Richard

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 243
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran argues for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person.

Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective'' toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others.

✦ Table of Contents

Content: The Image of Self-Knowledge --
The Fortunes of Self-Consciousness: Descartes, Freud, and Cognitive Science --
The Possibility of Self-Knowledge: Introspection, Perception, and Deflation --
Constitutive Relations and Detection --
"Conscious Belief": Locating the First-Person --
Making Up Your Mind: Self-Interpretation and Self-Constitution --
Self-Interpretation, Objectivity, and Independence --
Self-Fulfillment and Its Discontents --
The Whole Person's Discrete States --
Belief and the Activity of Interpreting --
The Process of Self-Creation: Theoretical and Deliberative Questions --
Relations of Transparency --
Self-Knowledge as Discovery and as Resolution --
Wittgenstein and Moore's Paradox --
Sartre, Self-Consciousness, and the Limits of the Empirical --
Avowal and Attribution --
Binding and Unbinding --
The Authority of Self-Consciousness --
Expressing, Reporting, and Avowing --
Rationality, Awareness, and Control: A Look Inside --
From Supervision to Authority: Agency and the Attitudes --
The Retreat to Evidence --
First-Person Immediacy and Authority --
Introspection and the Deliberative Point of View --
Reflection and the Demands of Authority: Apprehension, Arrest, and Conviction --
The Reflective Agent --
Impersonality, Expression, and the Undoing of Self-Knowledge --
Self-Other Asymmetries and Their Skeptical Interpretation --
The Partiality of the Impersonal Stance --
Self-Effacement and Third-Person Privilege --
Paradoxes of Self-Censure --
Incorporation and the Expressive Reading --
"Not First-Personal Enough?"

✦ Subjects

Self-knowledge, Theory of. Connaissance de soi. Zelfkennis.