ABSTRACT

Discussions of self-knowledge in contemporary anglophone philosophy focus primarily on how one knows one's own beliefs. This is one feature of a more general emphasis on the epistemic aspect of the mind. This chapter clarifies Richard Moran's account of first-person authority over belief as consisting in the deliberative authority to form one's own beliefs. It considers two ways in which this might be thought to apply to the case of desire, finding that one cannot form desires by deliberating only over whether something is objectively good, but that one can do so by considering whether it is subjectively attractive. The chapter focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre's theory that desires feature in experience by influencing the way the world appears to one. It expresses that Moran has overlooked this aspect of self-knowledge in part through focusing on one strand of Sartre's thought at the expense of another that is in tension with it.