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The First Person Perspective and Other Essays Sydney Shoemaker New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, xiii + 278 pp., $59.95, $18.95 paper

The last sections of the book present a concept of the self appropriate to a teleological account of knowing. These are difficult sections precisely because Mensch argues (appealing to Descartes and Husserl, Heisenberg and Bohr) for "a kind of 'uncertainty principle' of the self" (p. 192). The uncertainty comes from the self being both anonymous and objective, determined and free. Mensch's self is pluralistic—it concretizes itself over time through cognitive performances in relation to a plurality of surrounding worlds. Each of us "is" our performances; what I am is strictly tied to my surrounding worlds. Here, indeed, is the postmodern reversal of modernism: "rather than being a foundation for its epistemological relation to the world, the self is founded by this relation" (pp. 196-97). Being and knowing, then, not knowing and being. This raises the principle difficulty with this book. Mensch's "reversals" serve to re-establish the priority of ontology over epistemology. But, clearly, he does not want simply to turn modernism upside down; that would yield a different set of insoluble philosophical problems. In fact, his reversals do not so much show that the binary opposite to whatever modernism privileges is to be preferred as to show that there are no true opposites needing to be mediated. Subject and object, flesh and world, implicate each other. He misspeaks, I think, when he suggests, as he sometimes does, that we should privilege being over knowing. His commitment is, in fact, to the postmodernist's "both/and" rather than the modernist's "either/or" approach.