‘Where am I?’ This is something we might expect to hear from hapless explorers or academics with no sense of direction. If we can, we'll explain to our inquirer that he is east of East St. Louis and hope he can find his way from there. If he persists, insisting that he is not really lost, but only cannot find himself no matter how hard he looks, we might reasonably suspect that we are dealing with that peculiarly incorrigible academic explorer, the philosopher. When we hesitantly point to his body, we hear him explain, exasperated, ‘No, don't you get it? That's my body, but I’m looking for my self! And I cannot find it!’ At this point it is tempting to slip away, convinced that our philosophical friend is throttling himself with the noose of his own cleverness and is at risk of intellectual suicide by denying that he in fact has a self. Nevertheless, we shouldn't turn away so quickly: some pretty ingenious people from radically diverse schools of thought have endorsed the claim that the self ineluctably evades detection.

Consider two competing interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the epistemic and cognitive interpretations. The epistemic interpretation presents the first Critique as a work of epistemology, but what is more, it sees Kant as an early proponent of anti-psychologism — the view that descriptions of how the mind works are irrelevant for epistemology. Even if Kant does not always manage to purge certain psychological- sounding idioms from his writing, the epistemic interpretation has it, he is perfectly clear that he means his evaluation of knowledge to be carried out independently of psychology. In contrast, the cognitive interpretation presents the first Critique as a description of the operation of human cognitive faculties — sensibility, the understanding, and reason. Whatever else the first Critique might be on this interpretation, it is at least Kant's articulation of a theory of mind.

There has been much recent interest in questions of value in epistemology (for a thorough overview of this work, see Pritchard 2007), and in what follows I argue that epistemologists concerned with the value of true beliefs and knowledge would do well to devote attention to the enduring nature of beliefs, and in particular to the essential role that they play in constituting agents themselves.

I begin by considering an analogy commonly drawn by epistemologists between acts in the domain of ethics and beliefs in the domain of epistemology, and argue that it is fl awed in important respects. I propose that a better, more fruitful analogue for belief would be desire, or a similarly enduring state of an agent. This revision of a commonly used analogy may be of some value in itself, but I further consider how focusing excessively upon the belief-act analogy (with its implicit emphasis on the process of belief-formation) can lead to flaws or shortcomings in our epistemic value theorizing.

In 1769, the English bishop and theologian Edmund Law published a Defence of Mr. Locke's Opinion concerning Personal Identity. In this work, Law attempted to ‘explain and vindicate Mr. Locke's hypothesis’ (301) by offering a new account of Lockean persons. Law's account centers around three key claims. First, persons are modes — very roughly, properties — rather than substances. Second, the relevant properties are those that make moral evaluation appropriate, thus taking seriously Locke's insistence that ‘person’ is a forensic term. And third, the fact that persons are modes is what makes a demonstrative science of morality possible.

I am not convinced that Law's interpretation actually vindicates Locke, though it does make his theory come out rather better than is typically imagined. I am, however, convinced that Law's interpretation provides the best available account of Lockean persons.