We will analyze the concept of anonymity, along with cognate notions, and their relation to privacy, with a view to developing an understanding of how we control our identity in public and why such control is important in developing and maintaining our social selves. We will take anonymity to be representative of a suite of techniques of nonidentifiability that persons use to manage and protect their privacy. At the core of these techniques is the aim of being untrackable; this means (...) that others lack the information they would need either to intrude physically upon me or to discover some private facts about me. Anonymity often enough goes together with privacy, but not always. Consider a person walking down a foreign street. It is not a physically private situation but no one there knows who you are. On the other hand, when I cast a postal vote, this act is both private and anonymous. Privacy and anonymity seem to go together because of the way each protects something importantly personal, but their coming apart suggests a difference both in what they mean and in our purposes for securing them. A lot has been written about privacy, and deservedly so; there is reason to think anonymity, and its cognates, important as well. (shrink)

We argue that companion friendship is not importantly marked by self-disclosure as understood in either of these two ways. One's close friends need not be markedly similar to oneself, as is claimed by the mirror account, nor is the role of private information in establishing and maintaining intimacy important in the way claimed by the secrets view. Our claim will be that the mirror and secrets views not only fail to identify features that are in part constitutive of close or (...) companion friendship, but that they miss the mark quite broadly and fail to capture anything significant and distinctive about the ways in which friendship has an impact on the self. The article will proceed as follows. In the first section we outline our account of the self in friendship. In the next two sections we examine the mirror and secrets views and develop our own view in counterpoint to these. In the final section we defend our own account by showing how it provides the governing conditions which do distinguish friendship from other kinds of relations between persons. (shrink)

What is a self? I will try to answer this question by developing an analogy with something much simpler, something which is nowhere near as puzzling as a self, but has some properties in common with selves. What I have in mind is the center of gravity of an object. This is a well-behaved concept in Newtonian physics. But a center of gravity is not an atom or a subatomic particle or any other physical item in the world. It has (...) no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location. It is a fine example of what Hans Reichenbach would call an abstractum. It is a purely abstract object. It is, if you like , a theorist's fiction. It is not one of the real things in the universe in addition to the atoms. But it is a fiction that has nicely defined, well delineated and well behaved role within physics. (shrink)

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, _Practical Reflection_ develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, and the foundation (...) of morals. This new edition of _Practical Reflection_ contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. _ _ _ _. (shrink)