Tag: Self-knowledge

• September 3, 2014

  Self-deception and self-knowledge (with a brief excursus on the Socratic elenchus)

  I think it a good starting point to claim that someone would’t think of deceiving himself unless that about which he were about to deceive himself were thought to be painful for him to confront. The thought of someone trying to deceive himself about something pleasant sounds patently absurd. It could only be that someone who got a…
• May 28, 2014

  How self-knowledge is possible

  I pick up where I left off in the last post. Recall, first of all, that the picture of the mind as a some ‘place’ or ‘substance’ that contains important things (ideas, faculties, images, conceptions) deep within me is a mistaken picture of minding. Recall, second of all, that the question which springs from the picture of the mind…
• May 26, 2014

  How self-knowledge became necessary yet impossible

  The idea that the mind is a substance-like thing or an executive set of functions (a dashboard of sorts) residing in the head will lead to perplexities. I have already held that the mind is not ‘substance-like,’ that it does not reside in the head, that it does not contain a suite of activities, and that it…
• May 3, 2013

  How the art of philosophical inquiry leads to self-knowledge: A schema

  A philosophical inquiry aims at a desideratum. That desideratum is announced or implied in the statement: ‘This is it!’ The ‘this is it’ is the conclusion of the inquiry and the end of the philosophical conversation. The diagram below seeks to shed some light on this moment of self-knowledge. What distinguishes self-knowledge from other modes…