On Personality

<p>Warm sensitive creative outgoing cheeky creepy. Scan any personal ads page and it's clear that to get a life you need a personality first. It is also a notion with a long and often bizarre history: in early Greece and medieval Europe it was thought to depend on the balance of bile in the body. <br><em>On Personality</em> is a thoughtful and stimulating look under the skin of this widely-used but little understood phenomenon. Peter Goldie points out that we rely on personality to do a lot of work: describe judge understand explain and predict others as well as ourselves. Is it really up to this task? If personality is about 'character' is it a relic of a bygone Victorian age? If personality is so reliable how can a virtue in one person be a vice in another?<br>Drawing on a great range of philosophers novelists and films from Aristotle Hume Kant and Nietzsche to Joseph Conrad <em>Middlemarch</em> <em>War and Peace</em> and <em>Bridget Jones' Diary</em> Peter Goldie also discusses some famous psychology experiments. If personality is a reliable guide to predicting what people will do he reflects on why people often surprise us and asks whether personality is simply down to chance and circumstance. <br><em>On Personality </em>is essential reading for anyone interested in this fascinating but slippery concept. It will also make you think twice before writing your CV.</p>