This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Know thyself was a popular aphorism with the ancients.

But it isn't that clear what this means. What is the self? Is the self fixed and should we spend our lives trying to uncover its nature?

Is that being true to oneself? Or is the self, as the existentialistist believed something we create and revise as we go along?

And what is the link between the self and character?

The one and only Galen Strossen has grappled with these questions, though he lacks, he says, any strong sense of his own self.

Gailin Strossen, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Hello. The topic we're going to talk about is the sense of the South. In your

philosophical study of this, what have you discovered? What do people say about their

sense of the South? Well, one of the most striking things is people are so different in this respect.

Some people think they have a very clear, qualitatively detailed, unique sense of their own personality,

whereas some people feel that they don't really find anything

when they look inside and try to form a sense of what they're like.

Could you give an example of that?

Yeah, well let, on the positive side, Gerald Manne Hopkins is one of the best examples.

He talks of, I'm quoting now, my self-being, my consciousness and feeling of myself,

that taste of myself, of I and me, above and in all things which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum,

more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor,

and is incommunicable by any means to another man.

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