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Self-knowledge and self-deception present fundamental problems and puzzles to philosophy of mind. In this book accounts of both phenomena are systematically developed and defended against classical and recent views. The proposed ´cognitive ascent model´ offers an explanation of the intuitive peculiarity of self-knowledge as well as of the reach and limits of our epistemic privilege. The model builds on a general transparency principle for attitudes. Transparency can be the key to a genuinely first-personal knowledge of attitudes to the extent that someone´s having a certain attitude is to be identified with his attributing a value property to an intentional object. The offered view rejects the strategies of inner sense, parallelism and constitutivism. Paradigmatic self-deception, rather than being a failure of recognizing one´s own mental states is a failure at the level of metacognitive control over belief-formation. Self-deceptive beliefs are formed or maintained against criterial evidence via pseudo-rational adaptations in belief-systems.

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Christoph Michel, geb. 1980, Studium der Philosophie und Germanistik an den Universitäten Regensburg und Tübingen, Promotion 2012 an der Universität Bochum. Derzeit Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Universität Stuttgart. Forschungsschwerpunkte: Philosophie des Geistes, Philosophie der Kognition

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