Transparency and Reflection

The maxim "Know thyself" has been central to philosophy since antiquity, but today there is widespread skepticism, both within philosophy and in our intellectual culture at large, about the extent to which we can truly know our own minds and the extent to which self-knowledge matters to our lives. Transparency and Reflection argues that although we can be mistaken about ourselves in many respects, such mistakes occur against the background of a fundamental self-understanding that is necessarily available to any human subject. To deny this essential capacity for self-understanding, Matthew Boyle argues, is to leave out the very thing that makes us human.