Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems
of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of
itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a
distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental
life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point
where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her
own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and
Estrangement, Richard Moran argues for a reconception of the
first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough
repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a
deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge
and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and
constitutive of the very concept and life of the person.
Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran
develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent
rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for
his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very
authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the
first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on
certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores
the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery
or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective''
toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself
and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original
and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of
relations to oneself and relations to others.
