How To Know Your Self

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.