In this clear and reasoned discussion of self- knowledge and the self, the author asks whether it is really possible to know ourselves as we really are. He illuminates issues about the nature of self-identity which are of fundamental importance in moral psychology, epistemology and literary criticism. Jopling focuses on the accounts of Stuart Hampshire, Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Rorty, and dialogical philosophical psychology and illustrates his argument with examples from literature, drama and psychology.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have had to defend themselves from a barrage of criticisms throughout their history. In this book David Jopling argues that the changes achieved through therapy are really just functions of placebos that rally the mind's native healing powers. It is a bold new work that delivers yet another blow to Freud and his followers.

This book explores the 'self-concept', its cultural, psychopathological and philosophical implications.

In a well-known paper “Illusion and well-being”, Taylor and Brown maintain that positive illusions about the self play a significant role in the maintenance of mental health, as well as in the ability to maintain caring inter-personal relations and a sense of well-being. These illusions include unrealistically positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of personal control, and unrealistic optimism about one's future. Accurate self-knowledge, they maintain, is not an indispensable ingredient of mental health and well-being. Two lines of criticism are directed against (...) the creative self-deception hypothesis, one methodological and one substantive. First, it is argued that Taylor and Brown's method of eliciting experimental subjects' self-reports and comparative self-ratings under artificial experimental conditions lacks ecological validity and phenomenological realism. Second, it is argued that positive illusions diminish the range of reactive other-regarding attitudes and emotions that people can adopt. A literary case history (Ibsen's The wild duck ) which satisfies the criteria of ecological adequacy is used to illustrate the latter point. (shrink)

Can we ever truly answer the question, “Who am I?” Moderated by Alex Voorhoeve (London School of Economics), neuro-philosopher Elie During (University of Paris, Ouest Nanterre), cognitive scientist David Jopling (York University, Canada), social psychologist Timothy Wilson (University of Virginia),and ethicist Frances Kamm (Harvard University) examine the difficulty of achieving genuine self-knowledge and how the pursuit of self-knowledge plays a role in shaping the self.

Philosophical counselling, Ran Lahav and others claim, helps clients deepen their philosophical self‐understanding. The counsellor's role is the minimalist one of providing the client with the philosophical tools needed for reflective self‐evaluation. Respect for the client's autonomy entails refraining from intervening with substantive moral criticism, theories, and methods; the client's ways of working out fundamental questions like ‘Who am I and what do I really want?’cannot be assessed by the counsellor in terms of their truth‐value, but only in terms of (...) whether they reflect the client's autonomous choice to express him/herself in a certain way. I argue that this view, which is informed by an anti‐realist account of self and life‐history, undermines the distinction between self‐knowledge and self‐deception. Once interpretive and criteriological free rein is given to the client, and once personal, pragmatic and aesthetic considerations take precedence over truth‐value, then the way is left open to clients to generate the most morally convenient self‐interpretation to suit their current needs. I defend the view that truth matters in philosophical counselling; more specifically, that there is a basic distinction between true and false forms of self‐understanding. To do this, I offer a broadly realist account of self and reflective self‐evaluation. If this is right, then philosophical counsellors shoulder a significant burden of responsibility in helping their clients achieve an accurate, defensible, action‐guiding and truth‐oriented self‐understanding. (shrink)

The similarities between the Copernican and existentialist approach to self-knowledge can be clearly summarized by the combined effect they have on the correspondence model of self-knowledge. The self-knower who holds that knowledge conforms to its object is not only wrong but deceived if his goal is the complete one-to-one correspondence between, on the one hand, objectively validated propositions, and on the other an independently existing, recalcitrant reality (the Self). Both Kant and Sartre hold that we can know ourselves in terms (...) of appearances or quasi-objects, but they both deny that we can know what we “really” are over and above the empirical, contingent and finite knowledge we have. For Kant, this is because we are, most fundamentally, something unknowable; for Sartre, it is because we are, most fundamentally, nothing. In both cases, the self we purport to know is in an important sense other than itself: in saying “I,” more is being said than we know — and less. The “I” is spoken only through and across that which is not “I.”. (shrink)

This paper argues that cognitive psychology's practice of explaining mental processes in terms which avoid invoking phenomenology, and the person-level self-conception with which it is associated in common sense psychology, leads to a hybrid Cartesian dualism. Because phenomenology is considered to be fundamentally irrelevant in any scientific explanation of the mind, the person-level is regarded as scientifically invisible: it is a ghost-like housing for sub-personal computational cognition. The problem of explaining how the sub-personal and sub-phenomenological machinery of mind is related (...) to person-level experience is as troublesome for cognitive psychology as the problem Descartes faced in explaining how the ghost (the non-corporeal mind) is related to the machine (the material body).This paper outlines the historical roots of cognitive dualism, showing how it has come to recapitulate a number of puzzling conceptual dichotomies that have hindered scientific and philosophical psychology since Kantian constructivism. It then defends the view that cognitive psychology's commitment to the sub-personal explanatory level leads to exaggerated deflationary claims about the explanatory significance of phenomenology, and the personlevel framework. It is argued that phenomenological description must function as a constraint upon, and guide for, theory formation in cognitive psychology (as illustrated in the work of the cognitive neuro-psychologist A.R. Luria). Phenomenology must be brought into a kind of reflective equilibrium with the cognitive and neuro-sciences. (shrink)

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. (shrink)