On Personality
Peter Goldie
Routledge
Warm, sensitive, creative, outgoing, cheeky, creepy. Scan any personal ads page and it's clear that to get a life you need a personality first. It is also a notion with a long and often bizarre history: in early Greece and medieval Europe, it was thought to depend on the balance of bile in the body. <BR><EM>On Personality</EM> is a thoughtful and stimulating look under the skin of this widely-used but little understood phenomenon. Peter Goldie points out that we rely on personality to do a lot of work: describe, judge, understand, explain and predict others as well as ourselves. Is it really up to this task? If personality is about 'character', is it a relic of a bygone Victorian age? If personality is so reliable, how can a virtue in one person be a vice in another?<BR>Drawing on a great range of philosophers, novelists and films, from Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche to Joseph Conrad, <EM>Middlemarch</EM>, <EM>War and Peace</EM> and <EM>Bridget Jones' Diary</EM>, Peter Goldie also discusses some famous psychology experiments. If personality is a reliable guide to predicting what people will do, he reflects on why people often surprise us and asks whether personality is simply down to chance and  circumstance. <BR><EM>On Personality </EM>is essential reading for anyone interested in this fascinating but slippery concept. It will also make you think twice before writing your CV.