What if everything you thought you knew about yourself was an illusion?

For more than twenty years, University of Chicago professor J. Eric Oliver has taught a legendary course—The Intelligible Self—that students routinely describe as life-changing. Now, in How to Know Your Self, he brings the best of that classroom experience to readers everywhere, guiding us through the most profound and meaningful journey of all: understanding who we really are.

With warmth, wit, and an eye for the unexpected, Oliver draws on insights from neuroscience, psychology, physics, and ancient philosophy to explore the mystery of the self. What is this thing we call “me”? How does it take shape? Oliver tackles these questions and shows us that the answers we’ve inherited—and even the ones we’ve come to ourselves—are often more illusion than truth.

Drawing on decades of teaching, research, and personal experience, Oliver offers something deeper than quick fixes or life hacks: How to Know Your Self reveals a transformative new understanding of what it means to be a person—what it means to have and be a “self”—and shows how that insight can fundamentally reshape the way we live this one life we’re given. 

Praise & Reviews

Finally, an owner’s manual for the one thing we use the most: ourselves! From subatomic particles to supernatural experiences, Oliver takes us on a tour of what it means to be a person that is both impressively deep and wide-ranging. A tour de force full of interesting facts and findings that your self will be happy to have read and won’t forget.
–Nicholas Epley, author of Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want 

A frank and seductive exploration of what it means to be you. Oliver’s tone is deceptively light, but his richly documented account of multiple influences on the self is seriously thought-provoking.
–Richard Wrangham, author of The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

How to Know Your Self is a refreshingly engaging and honest attempt to grapple with the elusiveness of self-knowledge. Avoiding easy answers and soothing bromides, Oliver brings together insights from many fields to move us closer to the knowledge we both crave and studiously avoid.
_Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us