Warm sensitive creative outgoing cheeky creepy. Scan any personal ads pageand its clear that to get a life you need a personality first. It is also anotion with... » 

Warm sensitive creative outgoing cheeky creepy. Scan any personal ads pageand its clear that to get a life you need a personality first. It is also anotion with a long and often bizarre history in early Greece and medievalEurope 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 thiswidelyused but little understood phenomenon. Peter Goldie points out that werely on personality to do a lot of work describe judge understand explainand predict others as well as ourselves. Is it really up to this task? Ifpersonality is about character is it a relic of a bygone Victorian age? Ifpersonality is so reliable how can a virtue in one person be a vice inanother?Drawing on a great range of philosophers novelists and films from AristotleHume Kant and Nietzsche to Joseph Conrad Middlemarch War and Peace andBridget Jones Diary Peter Goldie also discusses some famous psychologyexperiments. If personality is a reliable guide to predicting what people willdo he reflects on why people often surprise us and asks whether personality issimply down to chance and circumstance. «