Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-KnowledgeSince 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. |
Contents
The Image of Self Knowledge | 1 |
Making Up Your Mind SelfInterpretation and SelfConstitution | 36 |
SelfKnowledge as Discovery and as Resolution | 66 |
The Authority of Self Consciousness | 100 |
Impersonality Expression and the Undoing of SelfKnowledge | 152 |
195 | |
201 | |