Author Description

"David Pears has given us an outstandingly lucid and intelligent account of matters of the highest importance. It is the first comprehensive and unified treatment of the paradoxes of irrational thought and irrational action".--John Elster, Times Literary Supplement This book is about self-deception and lack of self-control or wishful thinking and acting against one's own better judgement. Steering a course between the skepticism of philosophers, who find the conscious defiance of reason too paradoxical, and the tolerant empiricism of psychologists, it compares the two kinds of irrationality, and relates the conclusions drawn to the views of Freud, cognitive psychologists, and such philosophers as Aristotle, Anscombe, Hare and Davidson.