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Books

The Self and Self-Knowledge

Richard Baron inspects different ideas of the self.

What counts as a person? We think we know our own beliefs, desires and sensations, but what kind of knowledge is that? And how secure is that knowledge?

These are big philosophical questions, and this collection of essays by eleven leading philosophers shows just how much our thinking about them has advanced in recent years. Unfortunately, I only have space to mention some of the contributors here.

If there is a theme through this book, it is that to understand the self we need to interweave several strands in our thinking: for instance, that the concept of the self has an ethical dimension, or that concepts of rationality have special roles to play, or that you only have beliefs and feelings if you are disposed to state them.

The first of these strands is visible in Carol Rovane’s essay, in which she makes use of her ethical criterion of personhood. For her, a person is not necessarily a biological organism: a person is an entity that pursues its own coherent projects as a single entity, with one set of thoughts.

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