Dr Julian Bacharach. published January 2026.
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Is there any intrinsic connection between self-consciousness and objectivity? How, if at all, must self-conscious subjects take themselves to be related to an objective world, or take themselves to be so related? This question, of Cartesian and Kantian pedigree, is the subject of Anil Gomes’s subtle and penetrating book The Practical Self.
The book falls into a negative and a positive part. In the negative part, Gomes reviews traditional strategies for arguing from self-consciousness too bjectivity and finds them wanting. Although Descartes and Kant are the anchor points here, the bulk of Gomes’s critique is directed at the neo-Kantian tradition in latter twentieth-century British philosophy, exemplified by P. F. Strawson and his followers, and of which Gomes might well be regarded as a descendant. The positive part develops his own alternative route. According to Gomes, the missing piece of the puzzle is the fact that self-conscious subjects are also self-conscious agents, who determine the course of their own thinking, and recognise themselves to do so. And this recognition of our own agency is embedded in social practices in which we question and hold one another to account for our thoughts and attitudes.