Authority and Estrangement
Subtitle: An Essay on Self-Knowledge.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: January 1, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780691089447
Subjects: Philosophy of mind; The self, ego, identity, personality; Self-knowledge, Theory of; Philosophy; Epistemology; Mind & Body; Philosophy / Epistemology; Psychology
First sentence: The question of the nature of first-person relations has not suffered from philosophical neglect in recent years.
Description: 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 direction, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let along 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 or her 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 wat 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. -- from back cover.