When I was a seminarian, in a geriatric hospital, learning to be a chaplain, this old man told me one day that he was Dwight D. Eisenhower. The nurses urged me to try to talk him out of it. I couldn't. He steadfastly insisted that he was Eisenhower. Trouble was, I had no personal acquaintance with Dwight D. Eisenhower. The man was bald, had a Midwestern accent, had been in the army, seemed harmless enough, which, for all I knew, qualified him to be Dwight D. Eisenhower. He told me that I didn't have to salute him when I came in the room and that I was allowed me to call him ''Ike."

How do we know who we are?

Poor old Bertrand Russell, grand dame of modem atheism, fulminated against ''philosophers of unreason," Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. In his History of Western Philosophy, Russell terme…