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Thinking on Sunday: Challenging Self-Knowledge

In this talk, Professor Quassim Cassam will explore the nature of self-knowledge and debunk some superficially attractive accounts of its value.

What's so great about self-knowledge? What does it matter whether you know who you really are? Is self-knowledge the key to happiness or to being true to yourself? We live in a culture in which the importance of self-knowledge is taken for granted but rarely explained.

In this intriguing talk, Professor Quassim Cassam will explore the nature of self-knowledge and debunk some superficially attractive accounts of its value. Knowing yourself is important but a fresh approach to understanding its value is needed. The difficulty we face is that the most genuinely valuable types of self-knowledge are also the most challenging to acquire and the hardest to live with.

Quassim Cassam is the author of several books, including Self-Knowledge for Humans (2014). He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick and has also taught at Oxford, Cambridge and UCL. He writes about what he calls 'substantial' self-knowledge, including knowledge of our emotions, values and character, and focuses on the effect of our cognitive imperfections on our ability to gain self-knowledge. More recently he has written about intellectual vices and the difficulty of knowing our own vices.