From Peter Thiel’s doctrine of the “sovereign individual” to Drake’s call to “know yourself, know your worth,” self-knowledge is seen as the clear winner of our modern age. Therapists and a multi-billion dollar self-help industry promise to reveal and improve our inner selves, while modern neuroscience claims to decode the self into the firing of neurons. But critics argue the self is elusive and fundamentally unknowable. A self that tries to know itself is like an eye that tries to see itself. Schopenhauer, echoing ancient Indian thought, called the self “that which knows all things and is known by none,” while Wittgenstein argued that the self is not part of the world at all, but is rather its limit.

Should we give up on the idea that the self can be known like any other object? Does this unknowable self mean that the world that science investigates is necessarily incomplete? Or can the self be demystified, dragged into the light and studied like anything else?

Pioneering philosopher of panpsychism Galen Strawson, post-postmodern philosopher Hilary Lawson, and rising star philosopher Victoria Trumbull debate knowing the self.