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Show Acknowledgements to Volume II My first inkling that there was something amiss with the Humean conception of the self came before I knew enough Western philosophy to call it that. I am grateful to Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Edward Sullivan and Swami Vishnudevananda for urging me to read the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras in 1965. I am grateful most of all to Phillip Zohn for his willingness to argue with me at length about the import of these texts, and for introducing me to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in 1969, after reading an art text of mine on space and time ("Hypothesis") that inadvertently echoed its doctrine of transcendental idealism. The influence of all of these works on my thinking has informed my (you will pardon the pun) critical and skeptical approach to the Humean conception from the beginning. This project has been in production for a very long time. The ancestor of the concept of pseudorationality introduced in Chapter VII of Volume II was my undergraduate Social Sciences Phi Beta Kappa Medal Honors Thesis, "Deception and Self-Deception" (City College of New York, 1974). I am grateful to Martin Tamny, Arthur Collins and David Weissman for their guidance and input at that stage. The ancestor of the analysis of cyclical and genuine preference in Chapter IV of Volume I and Chapter III of Volume II was Chapter II of my Second-Year Paper, "A Theory of Rational Agency" (Harvard University, 1976), for advice and comments on which I am indebted to John Rawls. Both ancestors liased in revised form in my dissertation, "A New Model of Rationality" (Harvard University, 1981) under the supervision of John Rawls and Roderick Firth, in whose debt I permanently remain. Professor Firth provided the sounding board, the detailed and rigorous criticism, and the personal encouragement that has helped preserve my faith in the value of this project. I am deeply grateful for his involvement with it, and to have known him as a teacher and colleague. My animated discussions with Professor John Rawls, both about my work and about the role of the utility-maximizing model in his work, were absolutely crucial to my conviction that I was on to something. His example as a scholar and teacher, the breadth and depth of his learning, and his magisterial achievement in A Theory of Justice have remained an inspiration to me in all of my work. I rank Rawls's achievement as a theory-builder - a philosopher who constructs substantive theories - with those of the middle and late Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, and Habermas. A critic, by contrast, is a philosopher who mostly criticizes, improves upon, or demolishes theorybuilders' theories. The quintessential critic would be the slice-‘em-and-dice‘em Socrates of the early Platonic dialogues. But some might also count St. Thomas Aquinas, Sidgwick, the later Wittgenstein, and Ryle among the philosophical critics, for different reasons. Philosophers may reasonably |
