Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination

This book seeks to clarify the precise structure of self-consciousness and self-determination and elucidates their significance for our philosophical understanding of self-knowledge and human agency. The analysis challenges traditional models of theoretical self-knowledge and practical self-relation and elaborates an account of rationally grounded responsibility that jointly fulfills the demands of autonomy and authenticity.. Tugendhat''s study is a unique synthesis of the contemporary Anglo-American philosophical approach with an abiding concern for classical philosophical problems. It brings the methods of linguistic analysis to bear on such epistemological moral and metaphysical issues as the meaning and interconnections of self-knowledge ego identity rational self-understanding and freedom of the will.. In this context the views of Wittgenstein Heidegger Mead and Hegel are searchingly examined. The philosophical testimony of Kierkegaard Freud Habermas and others is also presented and weighed.. Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination is based on a series of lectures given at Heidelberg. Ernst Tugendhat is currently Professor of Philosophy at the Freie Universitat in Berlin. The book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought edited by Thomas McCarthy.