Abstract

The dissertation argues that transparent self-knowledge is a necessary condition of free will and investigates the epistemic limitations on such knowledge created by self-deception. It frames this problematic relationship between freedom, self-knowledge, and self-deception as a perennial but latent problematic in the history of philosophy which found explicit articulation in the Enlightenment rationality of Kant and Hegel and one of their critics, Kierkegaard. For this reason, the project intensively and comprehensively examines the problematic relationship between these concepts in each thinker, as well as in the history of the philosophical project as a whole. The overall argument of the dissertation seeks to show that the various attempts by these thinkers to comprehend freedom philosophically ultimately fail, and that this failure is suggestive of a Kierkegaardian deconstruction of the very possibility of a philosophically cogent theory of freedom. For this reason, it is further suggested that in place of philosophical theories of the self qua free agent, a conception of religious transcendence is required if the self-deceptive tendencies of the philosophical project as a whole are to be kept in check