Know thyself

The burden of this article is that although the idea of ‘the self’which Galen Strawson decribes in his target article is initially very attractive, it eventually doesn't work. There is a lot of competition for a ‘pole position’notion -- ‘human’, ‘person’, psuche, ‘soul’, even ‘sake’-- and the idea of ‘self’does not seem to deserve the prize. What Strawson wants to do with the notion of a ‘self’can be done equally well, and more economically, by the first-person pronoun. A question raised repeatedly is: ‘What is a self worth wanting?’Perhaps the greatest area of disagreement with Strawson's article is with his idea that ‘the self’needs to have little or nothing to do with time-related plans and emotions: guilt and remorse; pride; hope and expectation; career choices . . . even such apparently mundane things as pension-plans -- in fact, any long-term forward- or backward-looking psychological phenomena. The question of realism (about ‘the self’) is pressed.