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    Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge
    Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge
    Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge
    Ebook315 pages4 hours

    Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge

    By Richard Moran

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    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJan 6, 2012
    ISBN9781400842971
    Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge

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      Book preview

      Authority and Estrangement - Richard Moran

      Chapter One

      The Image of Self-Knowledge

      The question of the nature of first-person relations has not suffered from philosophical neglect in recent years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, attention has tended to concentrate on the particular relation of knowledge; and even more particularly, on the specifically first-person awareness we normally take ourselves to have of our own mental life. This chapter attempts to reorient some of our thinking about self-knowledge and place the more familiar epistemological questions in the context of wider self-other asymmetries which, when they receive attention at all, are normally discussed outside the context of the issues concerning self-knowledge. This task is really the concern of the book as a whole, but this first chapter seeks to establish three related points.

      The first is simply the proper characterization of the basic difference between how a person may know his own mind and how he may know the mind of another. In one guise or another, this is a familiar idea, and not only in philosophical discussion. However, the various services it has been pressed into, especially in the history of epistemology, have obscured the basic asymmetry and its rationale and freighted the idea of self-knowledge with a host of extraneous philosophical assumptions. For a long time, the problem of distinctively first-person awareness has led a kind of stepchild existence in philosophy, much less often investigated for its own sake than in the context of other problems, either concerning epistemological foundationalism and materialism, or, more recently, externalism about mental content and skepticism about meaning and its determinacy. This has contributed not only to a narrow view of the range and variety of first-person knowledge, but also to a distorting emphasis on various extreme and contentious claims about its nature and extent, which has deflected attention away from the basic differences that remain between knowledge of oneself and knowledge of others, even after the abandonment of anything resembling introspective infallibility. The wider view of self-other asymmetries, however, within which any such specific claims of first-person authority must take their bearings, obliges us to ground the discussion as much in moral psychology as in

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