The Duty of Self‐Knowledge

Ware, Owen

doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2009.00298.x

Cited by 94 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…6 The point reappears throughout the history of philosophy. Even Kant, who normally claims that we cannot generally settle the content of our duty, explicitly states that one is under obligation to know oneself (Kant 1797: 191 andWare 2009). In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard lets his pseudonym Climacus develop the idea that self-understanding is the starting-point of and central element in all ethical reflection.…”

Section: Ethics As 'The Problem That You See In Life'mentioning

confidence: 98%

‘A Glorious Sun and a Bad Person’. Wittgenstein, Ethical Reflection and the Other

Christensen

2010

Philosophia

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Most commentators working on Wittgenstein's remarks on ethics note that he rejects the very possibility of traditional normative ethics, that is, a philosophically justified normative guide for right conduct. In this article, Wittgenstein's view of ethical reflection as presented in his notebooks from 1936 to 1938 is investigated, and the question of whether it involves ethical guidance is addressed. In Wittgenstein's remarks, we can identify three requirements inherent in ethical reflection. The first two is revealed in the realisation that ethical reflection presupposes both a clear understanding of oneself and a normative ideal of how one ought to live and reason. The third source of normativity springs from the fact that ethical reflection involves a relationship with the other, not as judge, but as example and addressee. In this way, ethical reflection is essentially relational. In the article, we unfold how these three normative sources figure in Wittgenstein's remarks, especially how the third requirement, the relationship with the other, shows both a point of conversion and a difference between his view of ethics and religious faith. It will also be argued that even if Wittgenstein thus presents ethical reflection as a normatively guided activity, the content of the guidance is personal, springing solely from the reflecting individual.

show abstract

Section: Ethics As 'The Problem That You See In Life'mentioning

confidence: 98%

‘A Glorious Sun and a Bad Person’. Wittgenstein, Ethical Reflection and the Other

Christensen

2010

Philosophia

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As mentioned earlier, most scholars of Kant have given only peripheral importance to Kant's duty of self-knowledge. Among a handful of scholars who have paid attention to the problem of moral self-knowledge, Owen Ware (2009) and Emer O'Hagan (2009) stand out in their elaborate attempts to resolve it. In this section, I argue that their solutions to the problem of moral self-knowledge have shortcomings and are far from resolving it.…”

Section: Assessing Two Proposed Solutions To the Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 Among the scholars who have touched upon it, Onora O' Neill (1998) and Jeanine Grenberg (2005) argue that Kant's fundamental duty of self-knowledge is never fully attainable due to the wide limitations in knowing oneself. 2 Against this sceptical trend, Owen Ware (2009) and Emer O'Hagan (2009) maintain that it is possible to perform the duty of self-knowledge despite a restricted epistemic access into oneself. Ware (2009: 690-697) argues that Kant's duty of self-knowledge refers to the possibility of evaluating one's moral progress using conscience.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ware (2009) uses the terms "generic self-knowledge" and "particular self-knowledge" to refer to the knowledge about oneself as a "substance of a human being" and knowledge of oneself as "derived".4 BothWare (2009) and O'Hagan (2009) recognize these two forms that the problem of self-knowledge takes.Ware (2009: 674-675) refers to self-opacity and self-deception as 'type-1 opacity' and 'type-2 opacity' respectively. O'Hagan (2009: 527-529) calls the former as the 'epistemological problem' and does not subsume the latter under any specific term.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Duty of Knowing Oneself as One Appears: A Response to Kant’s Problem of Moral Self-Knowledge

Radhakrishnan

2019

PRB

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A challenge to Kant’s less known duty of self-knowledge comes from his own firm view that it is impossible to know oneself. This paper resolves this problem by considering the duty of self-knowledge as involving the pursuit of knowledge of oneself as one appears in the empirical world. First, I argue that, although Kant places severe restrictions on the possibility of knowing oneself as one is, he admits the possibility of knowing oneself as one appears using methods from empirical anthropology. Second, I show that empirical knowledge of oneself is fairly reliable and is, in fact, considered as morally significant from Kant’s moral anthropological perspective. Taking these points together, I conclude that Kant’s duty of self-knowledge exclusively entails the pursuit of empirical self-knowledge.

show abstract

“…Kant famously maintains that ‘the depths of the human heart are unfathomable’ (MM 6:447) and that we have a tendency to ‘flatter ourselves by falsely attributing to ourselves a nobler motive’ (G 4:407). This so‐called ‘opacity thesis’ (Ware : 672) has inspired another reading of Anscombe's objection, according to which the problem of relevant descriptions is the problem of determining which maxim a given action was truly based on—a task that proves difficult, even from the first‐person perspective . Recall immigration officer B, whose intention to reject the application for the sake of law abidance was contingent on the applicant's being a homosexual.…”

Section: Second Misconception: the Opacity Of The Human Heartmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Problem of Relevant Descriptions and the Scope of Moral Principles

Schumski

2017

European J of Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In her seminal attack on modern moral philosophy, G. E. M. Anscombe claims that Kant's ‘rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it’. Although this so‐called problem of relevant descriptions has received considerable attention in the literature, there is little agreement on how it should be understood or solved. My aim in this paper is, first, to clarify the problem by clearing up several misunderstandings, and, second, to show that the problem is rooted in a standard assumption about Kant's stance on the scope of moral principles—an assumption that precludes its solution. I argue that the problem consists in the fact that Kant's formula of universal law seems to stand in need of an account of moral sensibility that does not render the formula superfluous. But, as my discussion of existing solutions reveals, there can be no such account. Instead, I propose a dissolution: we should think of the formula of universal law itself as Kant's account of moral sensibility. In order to do so, we must reject the standard assumption that a principle is universal if and only if it holds for all instances of the action type that it specifies.

show abstract

The Duty of Self‐Knowledge

Cited by 94 publications

References 0 publications

‘A Glorious Sun and a Bad Person’. Wittgenstein, Ethical Reflection and the Other

‘A Glorious Sun and a Bad Person’. Wittgenstein, Ethical Reflection and the Other

The Duty of Knowing Oneself as One Appears: A Response to Kant’s Problem of Moral Self-Knowledge

The Problem of Relevant Descriptions and the Scope of Moral Principles

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About