Critical Notice of Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge

Abstract

There is a way of understanding philosophical problem of the self' that makes it unquestionably central to and ineliminable from the entire endeavor of philosophy, ancient as much as modern: if by asking about the self we mean to ask what we really, fundamentally are, then the problem of the self comprehends a great range of problems, and every philosophical position worth the name will include a theory of the self. In analytic philosophy, however, the problem of the self has come to be understood differently: what it refers to in the first instance is the puzzle presented by knowledge claims regarding one's own psychological states, a problem that is distinguished from, while enjoying some connections with, the problem of the conditions for personal identity and the mind-body problem, and that resolves itself into a set of finer problems concerning the conditions of psychological selfascription, the reference of the first-person pronoun, the notion of immunity to error through misidentification, and so forth. In a historical perspective, it is as if the self has ceased to be a lynchpin and become a philosophical epiphenomenon: the self is now regarded as presenting a problem whose solution depends substantially on what positions are taken in other areas of philosophy, and that does not play an important or extensive positive role in elucidating issues outside the philosophy of mind. The key steps through which this shrinking of the concept and problem has come about include of course the linguistic turn and Wittgenstein's influential contribution, and the move away from Cartesian foundations in epistemology. But the decisive factor, it may be ventured, is acceptance, motivated from several quarters, of what may be called the Lockean or Strawsonian picture, according to which the methodologically and ontologically primary item is not the I of self-consciousness but the living, concrete,