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The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound reflections of our time on the nature of the human subject and self-understanding — the human condition, philosophically speaking. This book mimes those extensive writings for a conception of the self. And more specifically, the book offers a discussion of Wittgenstein's later writings on language and mind as they hold special significance for the understanding and clarification of the distinctive character of self-descriptive or autobiographical language. The book also undertakes a philosophical investigation of selected autobiographical writings — among the best examples we have of human selves exploring themselves — as they cast new and special light on the critique of mind-body dualism and its undercurrents in particular, and on the nature of autobiographical consciousness more generally. The chapters take up in turn the topics of self-consciousness, what Wittgenstein calls ‘the inner picture’; mental privacy and the picture of metaphysical seclusion; the very idea of our observation of the contents of consciousness; first-person expressive speech; reflexive or self-directed thought and competing pictures of introspection; the nuances of retrospective self-understanding, person-perception, and the corollary issues of self-perception (itself an interestingly dangerous phrase); self-defining memory; and the therapeutic conception of philosophical progress as it applies to all of these issues. The cast of characters interwoven throughout the discussion include, in addition to Wittgenstein centrally, Augustine, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Iris Murdoch, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Cavell, among others.

This book examines the views on friendship of the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, friendship is the ideal type of relationship that rational beings should cultivate. The book argues that Aquinas fundamentally revised some of the main features of Aristotle's paradigmatic account of friendship so as to accommodate the case of friendship between radically unequal beings: man and God. As a result, Aquinas presented a broader view of friendship than Aristotle's, allowing for a higher extent of disagreement, lack of mutual understanding, and inequality between friends.

This book explores the variety of ideas and assumptions that humans have entertained concerning three main topics, first being, or what there is, secondly humanity – what makes a human being a human – and thirdly understanding, namely both of the world and of one another. Amazingly diverse views have been held on these issues by different individuals and collectivities in both ancient and modern times. The aim is to juxtapose the evidence available from ethnography and from the study of ancient societies, both to describe that diversity and to investigate the problems it poses. Many of the ideas in question are deeply puzzling, even paradoxical, to the point where they have often been described as irrational or frankly unintelligible. Many implicate fundamental moral issues and value judgements, where again we may seem to be faced with an impossible task in attempting to arrive at a fair-minded evaluation. How far does it seem that we are all the prisoners of the conceptual systems of the collectivities to which we happen to belong? To what extent and in what circumstances is it possible to challenge the basic concepts of such systems? This study examines these questions cross‐culturally and seeks to draw out the implications for the revisability of some of our habitual assumptions concerning such topics as ontology, morality, nature, relativism, incommensurability, the philosophy of language, and the pragmatics of communication.

The Beloved Self is about the ‘holy grail’ of moral philosophy: an argument against Egoism, that we all have reasons to be moral. The first part of the book introduces three versions of Egoism, each paralleling a different moral theory, and sheds new light on the concept of self-interest in virtue ethics and especially in Kant's moral theory. Part Two looks at attempts to prove that Egoism is false, and shows that even modest arguments against Egoist appear to fail. Part Three discusses the relationship between knowledge and action and defends a new conception of moral epistemology, centred on the importance of moral understanding, which has wide-ranging implications regarding not only moral testimony and moral disagreement but also the nature of virtue and morally worthy action. This final part of the book culminates in a vindication of morality, an argument that it is not epistemically rational to believe the most plausible versions of Egoism.

The three parts of the book comprise three distinct investigations under a common theme: enquiry into inter-relationships between issues about the nature of knowledge and issues about the value of knowledge. The first investigation provides an analysis of problems concerning the value of knowledge and a critical examination of responses to these by virtue epistemologists. The book finds virtue-theoretic accounts wanting and argues that there is a cognitive state — understanding — which is similar to, but different from knowledge, and which has final value. In the second investigation the book presents accounts of perceptual knowledge, knowledge from indicator phenomena, and knowledge from testimony, in each of which recognitional abilities feature prominently. Consideration of these abilities, the book claims, enables us to reach a better understanding of knowledge and its value. The third investigation focuses on the relationship between perceptual knowledge and knowledge of our own intentional actions. The book argues for an account of knowledge and justification to which a certain kind of second-order knowledge is central and applies this both to perceptual knowledge, and knowledge of our own intentional actions, with a view to explaining ways in which knowledge is of value.

The virtue ethics movement in recent philosophical ethics can usefully be divided into two quite separate streams of thought. Some have turned to the texts of Plato and Aristotle for new answers to established questions in philosophical ethics, while others have sought a vantage point from which the basic questions of the field could themselves be put in question. The aim of this book is to elaborate and defend a version of the second, more radical sort of virtue ethics. The book begins with a fundamental reconsideration of the way in which thought makes itself practical in temporally extended activities and lives. This reconsideration yields an alternative picture of the self — a picture with recognizably Aristotelian and Platonic elements — and puts that picture to work in retrieving an unfamiliar conception of the proper task of philosophical ethics, one that provides a suitable home for retrieving the virtue concepts. The critical bite of the book is directed in the first instance at ideas that are prevalent among philosophers. Yet there is reason to think that these philosophical ideas express a conception of the self that shapes contemporary Western culture, and that hinders our capacity to make full sense of our activities, passions, and lives, or to attain full articulacy about the values to which we might hope to answer. The book argues that the rise of the fact/value distinction and of the characteristically modern distinction between person‐relative and impersonal goods are best understood as a story of encroaching confusion and not as the story of progressive discovery that they are often taken to be. The book culminates in an attempt to show that the ethical and epistemic virtues conduce to a single, monistic sort of goodness that fosters intimate relationships as well as healthy political community, and that overcomes the putative opposition between self‐interest and morality.

This work is a narrative study of the interactions between Hume's naturalism and his skepticism as they unfold in the Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. More specifically, it examines the way in which the relationship between Hume's naturalism and skepticism shifts dramatically as he delves more deeply into the operations of the human understanding. At first, Hume's skeptical arguments largely play a subservient role of eliminating intellectualist competitors to his naturalistic account of belief formation. This is true, with one minor exception, in the first three parts of book 1 of the Treatise. The situation changes radically in part 4 of book 1, where Hume's investigation of human faculties reveals them to be capricious and unreliable. Hume finds the situation so dire that he comes to question whether anyone, himself included, possesses mental faculties capable of producing a science of human nature. This is Hume's skeptical crisis. The remainder of the book examines Hume's various efforts to extract himself from this difficulty, ending, in the Enquiry, with the claim that a suitable mitigated, or moderate, form of skepticism can arise by bringing radical Pyrrhonian doubts into a proper balance with common instinctive beliefs.

This book offers an exposition and defence of the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus, one of the most influential of ancient thinkers, the father of philosophical scepticism. The subsequent sceptical tradition in philosophy has not done justice to Sextus: his views stand up today as remarkably insightful, offering a fruitful way to approach issues of knowledge, understanding, belief, and rationality. It is widely supposed that any form of scepticism that arrives at a global denial of the availability of rationally justified beliefs is self-refuting and unliveable. The author shows that the former objection can be disarmed by distinguishing between the mature Pyrrhonean sceptic's assessment of his negative epistemological arguments and the assessment forced upon his philosophical opponents by their own rationalistic code. The latter objection overlooks the role Sextus allocates to beliefs that are necessitated by the Pyrrhonist's psychological and biological constitution.