Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. by Richard Moran ISBN: 0-691-08945-0 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 January, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Admiring yourself for despising yourself and so on
Comment: Imagine you have to finish off a piece of work tonight, or in any case it would be good if you did - if only for the relief of having got it over with. You have seen yourself loose heart and fail at similar tasks before, though they were by no means impossible to accomplish. As you set out to add a few extra hundred words to your manuscript, your poor record so far begins to haunt you. Knowing yourself all too well, as far as keeping deadlines goes anyway, you end up thinking that you, or whoever is having your thoughts, must be a gullible fool. Surely someone else, in all respects like you, could only be expected not to finish it off tonight, so why should it make any difference that the prediction of failure in this particular case concerns you and not someone else?
And yet it does matter that the thoughts about your task tonight are yours and not someone else's, and that is because - at least if you want to stay sane - you cannot abdicate from responsibility for your actions into a purely spectatorial perspective on what you will in fact do. What makes all the difference here is not that you are more intimately familiar with your past record as a writer than anyone else might be, or that you grasp all the inner circumstances of writing and its terrible difficulty in your specific case, or else that no one can see that you really have it within yourself to succeed. Rather, the crucial point is that you cannot always merely observe yourself as if you were someone else and retain a normal life as a person. If you resolve to churn out a few more pages tonight, you may of course be deluding yourself again, but your intention will differ very significantly from an impersonal assessment of how things are likely to turn out with someone who just happens to be you.
Richard Moran's wonderful book examines this and related issues in a subtle and patient way, and it does a lot to undermine the belief that it is special access to your inner life, rather than a unique responsibility for what you do with yourself, that makes you a person, someone already lodged in a world with others like you. All chapters repay in abundance close attention and rereading, but the last one - with a brilliant passage on Kingsley Amis's adulterer admiring himself for despising himself for his adultery - is a masterpiece. In addition to all its philosophical merits, this book is also a discreet source of hope for eternal procrastinators like the present writer...
 |
Title: Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective by Donald Davidson ISBN: 0198237537 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
 |
Title: Mind, Value, and Reality by John McDowell ISBN: 0674007131 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 2001 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
 |
Title: Knowing Our Own Minds (Mind Association Occasional Series) by Crispin Wright, Barry C. Smith, Cynthia Macdonald ISBN: 0199241406 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: December, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
 |
Title: The Importance of What We Care About : Philosophical Essays by Harry G. Frankfurt ISBN: 0521336112 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 27 May, 1988 List Price(USD): $33.00 |
 |
Title: Essays on Nonconceptual Content by York H. Gunther ISBN: 0262571617 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 24 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
