Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind

T. Parent is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the philosophy department at Virginia Polytechnic and State University. He came to Virginia Tech in August 2009, also the month the Ph.D. was granted (UNC, Chapel Hill). Primarily, he works on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and meta/ontology. His publications on such topics have appeared in Philosophical Studies, the Journal of Philosophy, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, among others. He lives with his wife in Blacksburg, Virginia.

• Part I: PreliminariesPreamble: Is Philosophy Anti-Scientific? 1. Introduction: How is Rational Self-Reflection Possible? 2. The Empirical Case against Infallibility Part II: Knowledge of Thought3. Infallibility in Knowing What One Thinks 4. Objection 1: It’s Apriori that Water Exists 5. Objection 2: Thought Switching 6. Content Externalism Does Not Imply Wayward Reflection Part III: Knowledge of Judging7. Infallibility in Knowing What One Judges 8. Infallibility in Knowing What One Expresses 9. Objection 1: It’s Apriori that the Mental Exists 10. Objection 2: Attitude Switching 11. Attitude Confabulation Does Not Imply Wayward Reflection Part IV: Denoument12. Conclusion: How Rational Self-Reflection is Possible

"Parent has shown significant ingenuity in addressing the tension between our commitment to the value of critical self-reflection and evidence from empirical psychology, and there is much of interest in this book, in particular, the discussion of the philosophical arguments from content externalism to skepticism about self-knowledge." —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews"Philosophical reflection on self-knowledge has recently bifurcated into two tendencies: on the one hand, there is increasingly strenuous effort from the armchair to resolve various a priori puzzles concerning the very possibility of self-knowledge, while on the other hand, there is an increasingly empirically informed effort to debunk our pre-scientific pretensions to self-knowledge. Parent’s manuscript provides a scholarly, detailed, and ultimately successful effort to reconcile these two tendencies, while also showing why the topic of self-knowledge is a topic of urgent practical importance. This is an important book." —Ram Neta, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA