Selves of Wives and Selves of Daughters

True Selves, False Selves, and the Ambiguity of Authenticity

Possible Selves

The concept of possible selves is introduced to complement current conceptions of self-knowledge. Possible selves represent individuals' ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming, and thus provide a conceptual link between cognition and motivation. Possible selves are the cognitive components of hopes, fears, goals, and threats, and th...

The society of selves.

Human beings are not only the most sociable animals on Earth, but also the only animals that have to ponder the separateness that comes with having a conscious self. The philosophical problem of 'other minds' nags away at people's sense of who--and why--they are. But the privacy of consciousness has an evolutionary history--and maybe even an evolutionary function. While recognizing the importan...

Automata, Receptacles, and Selves

After rejecting Carruthers' conflation of levels of consciousness as implausible and conceptually muddled, and Carruthers' claim that nonhumans are automata as undermined by evolutionary and ethological considerations, we develop a general criticism of contemporary philosophical approaches which, though recognizing nonhuman consciousness, still see animals as mere receptacles of experiences. Th...

Reasons and Real Selves

Most accounts of responsibility begin from either of two prominent points of departure: the idea that an agent must have some characterological or expressive connection to the action, or alternately, the idea that an agent must be in some sense responsive to reasons. Indeed, we might even understand much of the past couple of decades of philosophical work on moral responsibility as concerned wi...