Adrian Haddock talks about the importance to philosophy of first-person thought. He begins by considering a question that can grip children in the early stages of their life – when they look into a mirror, and ask: "How can I be this thing here?" He then connects this question to his current work by considering the difficulties involved in making sense of the very idea of oneself as identical to a perceptually given object. He suggests that thinking through this difficulty is one way of arriving at a conception of self-understanding as a form of universal understanding. Haddock ends by suggesting that the role of philosophy is to give voice to this universal self-understanding. Adrian Haddock is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling.