Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This work examines some of the epistemological and ontological conditions of the deep self-knowledge that is demanded by the Delphic motto gnothi seauton . The guiding questions are: what is the 'self' that deep self-knowledge is of? What are we such that we can ask deep and puzzling questions about our life-plans, our self-conceptions and the meaning of our lives? Can we know ourselves as we really are, or only under a certain description which conceals as much as it reveals? What is the nature of the relation between self-knowledge and reality? ;The central thesis that is defended is that a person is to a certain extent a self-defining and self-forming being by virtue of his self-knowledge; fundamental changes in how he knows himself, and conceives his way of life, his life-history, emotions, final ends, death etc.--particularly in light of fundamental practical questions --necessarily occasion changes in what he is. What he is at any one moment in his life is in part constituted by his self-knowledge. ;To account for the complex 'inter-relation' between self-knowledge and its object, and the possibility of self-formation, a broadly Kantian theory of constituting activity is developed, as well as a theory of the empirical 'under-determination' of self-knowledge. The peculiarity of self-knowledge is that the knower is the known, and that he is active with respect to the object known ; the object of knowledge and the knowing subject change and extend their range together. This complicates some of the claims of realism and the correspondence theory of truth: self-knowledge is not a matter of the strict conformity of beliefs or conceptions to an independent, determinate and unchanging reality. In Kantian terms, the object of self-knowledge conforms to the conditions of knowledge. ;This broadly Kantian approach is brought to the analysis of Hampshire and Sartre's theories, which are studied as illustrations of the general ontological and epistemological conditions of self-knowledge. Other issues that are discussed include the problem of truth conditions in deep self-knowledge, the agent-observer dualism in self-inquiry, the relational model of the self, and Iris Murdoch's critique of Hampshire and Sartre