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.
On Personality 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?
Drawing on a great range of philosophers, novelists and films, from Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche to Joseph Conrad, Middlemarch, War and Peace and Bridget Jones'' Diary, Peter Goldie
