FORUM: THE IDEA OF THE SELF

Extract

I want to begin by thanking all the participants in today's roundtable for their comments and criticisms, and especially those who worked to conceive and arrange it. I am enormously flattered, as I think most people would be, to find myself the subject of sustained attention, however critical, over a whole afternoon, and especially from such thoughtful and insightful colleagues. Too bad for me that I did not have all these critiques before finishing the book, since it would surely have been better for them. It did profit from earlier comments by two of today's panel members, Peter Gordon and Anthony La Vopa; that they have both been willing to add to the discussion in the way they have now is a mark of intellectual and personal generosity that I greatly appreciate. Let me take up each of the four comments in turn.