Know thyself, the inscription at the shrine of Delphi reads. But can we truly know ourselves

 Know thyself, the inscription on that navel of the world - the shrine of Delphi reads.

But can we truly know ourselves, like the Ancient Greeks believed?

I from looking inside ourselves to the reflection we put out into the world. Do we gain self knowledge through introspection, or are there better ways of finding out who we are?

that the perceptions that others have of us have to be mediated through our imaginations where we are sort of adopting imaginative perspectives on ourselves.

imagination plays a key role in the formation of self-conception,. And self-conception is basically just how we define or identify ourselves. In a sense, your self-conception gives you a view of yourself as a person in the world, and it is distinct from your point of view, And Mackenzie says that we shape our self concepts by reflecting on different aspects of our points of view. And these aspects might include our desires, our habits, our character traits.

I mean, as I mentioned before, I think that one way that we know each other is through the bouncing back to us of our reflections off of the surfaces that other people are. And I think that's what writing also can do because when we write the self, we externalize the self in the form of a written text, turning parts of ourselves, essentially into an object, let's say, that can come back to you, especially as it is seen by others, especially in the case of letter writing, right, where you put yourself into the letter, that letter is seen by others. And then they write a letter back to you in a literal case of reflection and refraction

e fact or phenomenon of light, radio waves, etc. being deflected in passing obliquely t

I can doubt what I think, but I cannot doubt that I think.

there have been a lot of philosophers who have concluded that you actually can't have self knowledge because the self is not something that you can know. So they take the same premise of Moran which is that introspection doesn't work the same way that perception does and conclude that that means that there's no possibility of self knowledge at all.

neither you, nor I believe the self is a thing

So it seems that for Socrates, that philosophical navel of our world,, knowledge is really founded on self knowledge

But then there's a second issue, which is what kind of thing we're taking the self to be. So this isn't an issue about our access or lack of distance from the self. It is the question of whether the self is a thing at all. Even if we could get the right distance on ourselves, we might find that the self is not a thing in the way that a cup is a thing.

Is self knowledge gained by introspection or are there better ways of getting a sense of who we are and what is the self that we're trying to get to know to begin with?

have to take that belief and try to assess the place that it occupies within the larger web of beliefs and convictions that I take to be my worldview, to see how it fits or doesn't fit in that web, you know? And so that labor of interpretation and trying to make everything cohere, it's never going to cohere perfectly or even by and large, but we can nonetheless treat it as a Kantian regulative ideal where we aspire to make our beliefs cohere.

ecause I do think all memory is fundamentally imaginative and a lot of imagination has a memorial component to it. And so maybe we can just think about those to us together that we imagine slash remember as ways of creating alternative worlds to test our desire