Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge takes the reader on tour of the nature, value, and limits of self-knowledge. Mitchell S. Green calls on classical sources like Plato and Descartes, 20th-century thinkers like Freud, recent developments in neuroscience and experimental psychology, and even Buddhist philosophy to explore topics at the heart of who we are. The result is an unvarnished look at both the achievements and drawbacks of the many attempts to better know one's own self.





Key topics in this volume include:








Knowledge - what it means to know, the link between wisdom and knowledge, and the value of living an "examined life"







Personal identity - questions of dualism (the idea that our mind is not only our brain), bodily continuity, and personhood







The unconscious - including the kind posited by psychoanalysis as well as the form proposed by recent research on the so-called adaptive unconscious







Free will - if we have it, and the recent arguments from neuroscience challenging it







Self-misleading - the ways we willfully deceive ourselves, and how this relates to empathy, peer disagreement, implicit bias, and intellectual humility