Abstract

There is a way of understanding “the 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 self-ascription, the reference of the first-person pronoun, the notion of immunity to error through misidentification, and so forth.