Self-Knowledge as a Personal Achievement: Early Modern and Contemporary Views on an Ancient Imperative

"In recent debate, philosophers have paid increasing attention to the fact that, in ordinary language, the word 'self-knowledge' is used to invoke an ideal people can strive for, and does not primarily, as proposed in recent philosophy, refer to the self-conscious mode of our mental life. To keep these two uses of the word apart, philosophers distinguished categorially between ideal or 'Socratic self-knowledge' and 'basic self-knowledge'. This book challenges any account that relies on such a categorial distinction. Proposing to conceptualize 'self-knowledge' as referring to a spectrum of possible epistemic self-relations, it argues that substantial self-insight such as knowledge of one's dispositional traits or recognition of one's falling under the human condition does not just increase our abstract knowledge of ourselves, but also transforms the self-relation experienced in immediate self-awareness. To elaborate on the conditions enabling this view, the book not just comments on the analytic discussion of self-knowledge since Wittgenstein; in addition, it provides close readings of passages from Montaigne, Charron, Hobbes, Descartes, Pierre Nicole and La Rochefoucauld, Spinoza, Shaftesbury and Rousseau, where the appeal to Socratic self-knowledge is explicitly voiced. In doing so, it shows how philosophical engagement with historical sources may help understand the ideal of Socratic self-knowledge"-- Provided by publisher.