Should we
think of human lives as narratives or as somehow narrative-like? Should we be
trying to make our lives into a good story? Is the self some kind of fiction?
Philosophers sometimes think of human selfhood as having a narrative form or
structure. In this module, we will take our point of departure from a
widely-discussed paper by Galen Strawson in which he launches an all-out attack
on narrative theories of the self. Describing himself as an 'Episodic',
Strawson rejects both the descriptive and the normative parts of the view that
human lives are narratives or narrative-like. Drawing on Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, Ricouer and others, we will examine how convincingly
the 'narrativists' are able to respond to Strawson's critique.
- Module Supervisor: Daniel Watts