Historical explanations in evolutionary biology are commonly characterized as narrative explanations. Examples include explanations of the evolution of particular traits and explanations of macroevolutionary transitions. In this paper I present two case studies of explanations in accounts of pathogen evolution and host-pathogen coevolution, respectively, and argue that one of them is captured well by established accounts of time-sequenced narrative explanation. The other one differs from narrative explanations in important respects, even though it shares some characteristics with them as it is (...) also a population-level historical explanation. I thus argue that the second case represents a different kind of explanation that I call historical explanation of type phenomena. The main difference between the two kinds of explanation is the conceptualization of the explanandum phenomena as particulars or type phenomena, respectively. Narrative explanations explain particulars but also deal with generalization, regularities and type phenomena. Historical explanations of type phenomena, on the other hand, explain multiply realizable phenomena but also deal with particulars. The two kinds of explanation complement each other because they explain different aspects of evolution. (shrink)

This essay explores the nature of narrative representations of individual lives and the connection between these narratives and personal good. It poses the challenge of determining how thinking of our lives in story form contributes distinctively to our good in a way not reducible to other value-conferring features of our lives. Because we can meaningfully talk about our lives going well for us at particular moments even if they fail to go well overall or over time, the essay maintains that (...) our good must consist in something more than an accumulation of good discrete moments. Since persons have the capacities to reason, remember, and imagine, our good depends on a larger view of our lives that integrates its particular moments in a narrative. That narrative provides shape and texture to our lives. Storytelling serves to connect the events of our lives to each other, and to explain why the meaning and value of past events or features of our lives can shift as the life, and hence the story of the life, continues to unfold. The essay concludes that narrative enables us to see our lives in ways that support, encourage, or promote our self-concept and self-worth as agents who have controlling authority over our own lives. (shrink)

Both in the Netherlands and in Britain, practices of ‘life story work’ have emerged in nursing for persons with intellectual disabilities. The narrative approach to care and support may at the same time be considered as an attempt to compensate for the ‘disabled authorship’ of many persons with intellectual disabilities and as a sign of controversy with standard practices of diagnosis and treatment that tend to neglect the personal identities of both clients and care givers, their particular historical and relational (...) contexts and their spiritual needs. This paper argues that narrative ethics not only offers an appropriate moral framework for practices of life story work, but that these practices are a narrative ethics in action. Starting with an account of the concept of ‘life story work’ as it has been introduced in nursing practices in the field of intellectual disability, the paper explains its relationship with key characteristics of narrative ethics. The teleological dimension in narrative ethics and in practices of life story work sparks off a dialectic process of understanding of the client and self‐understanding of the care giver. It also invites a respect for life in its openness toward the future and presupposes an openness toward other possible versions of the life narrative. The phenomenological and hermeneutic‐interpretative methodologies in narrative ethics aim at a ‘sudden moment of intimacy’ in relationships of nurses and clients. The ‘epiphany’ of this essential moment of recognition, insight and engagement cannot, however, be brought about by methodology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Narrative, and the Lifeworld: The Construction of Collective IdentityAlan G. GrossAt the beginning of King Lear, at the point of ceding his throne to his three daughters, Lear asks each for a public acknowledgment of her love. Goneril and Regan flatter their father with effusive declarations, but Lear’s youngest, and his favorite, Cordelia, refuses to do so:I love your Majesty According to my bond; no more or less...................... (...) Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me; I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all.(1936, 1.1.94–107) [End Page 118]Furious, Lear disinherits his daughter.Cordelia’s speech is remarkable only in its articulation of what Lear should have known; its dramatic impact is a consequence of Lear’s reaction to his daughter’s argument for divided loyalty that is based on a string of commonplaces that are part of the lifeworld that Lear and his daughter—and every other person in the play—inhabit. Any part of this lifeworld may be thematized, of course; it may be brought out into the open as a topic of discussion. That is what Cordelia does; under duress, she shifts from what Jürgen Habermas calls communicative action to a level he calls discourse, a level that reveals the relationship between the personal and the social as well as their underlying cultural presuppositions. Because Lear refuses to grasp the obvious, the narrative progress of the play is temporarily interrupted and permanently veers off course. Although on occasion we can thematize aspects of our lifeworld, the lifeworld as a whole cannot be subject to scrutiny; it is the totality of certainties, skills, practices, and interpretative frames that we take for granted as we each find our way in the everyday worlds that form the changing horizons of our experience. I take it for granted that too many cooks spoil the broth; telephoning is a skill I do not puzzle over; waiting patiently in line is a social behavior I practice without thinking; with no special effort, I interpret the intimacy of a couple’s relationship by the way they publicly behave toward each other.The lifeworld, a concept initiated by Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Alfred Schütz, Martin Heidegger, and Jürgen Habermas, has been largely neglected by rhetorical theorists and critics. It is the purpose of this paper to show that remedying this neglect opens up fruitful avenues of critical practice and theory. I proceed, first, by defining the lifeworld. Next, I shift perspectives: I analyze how collectivities make sense of their lives by telling stories about themselves grounded in their lifeworld values. It is in the lifeworld’s role in storytelling that, I claim, Aristotle’s Rhetoric becomes an important part of the picture. This is because the Rhetoric is, at bottom, a theory of the way lifeworld values enter into the public sphere. This characterization of the Rhetoric permits us to reconcile two important instantiations of the lifeworld, Habermas’s and Aristotle’s, a reconciliation in which communicative action becomes a special case of rhetorical interaction. Finally, from the perspective of the lifeworld, I reflect on the significance of an exemplary case of the construction of collective identity, the Selma march. [End Page 119]Defining the LifeworldEdmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences contains the first explicit philosophical analysis of the lifeworld as “the world that is constantly pregiven, valid constantly and in advance as existing.... Every end presupposes it; even the universal end of knowing it in scientific truth presupposes it, and in advance” (1970, 382). Because the lifeworld is presupposed in everyday communication, it can be entered only by disciplined reflection: “Contemplation is privileged to the extent that it reveals the structures of the world and has them as theme” (1973, 65). Although the lifeworld... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Narrative, and the Lifeworld: The Construction of Collective IdentityAlan G. GrossAt the beginning of King Lear, at the point of ceding his throne to his three daughters, Lear asks each for a public acknowledgment of her love. Goneril and Regan flatter their father with effusive declarations, but Lear’s youngest, and his favorite, Cordelia, refuses to do so:I love your Majesty According to my bond; no more or less...................... (...) Good my lord, You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me; I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honour you. Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all.(1936, 1.1.94–107) [End Page 118]Furious, Lear disinherits his daughter.Cordelia’s speech is remarkable only in its articulation of what Lear should have known; its dramatic impact is a consequence of Lear’s reaction to his daughter’s argument for divided loyalty that is based on a string of commonplaces that are part of the lifeworld that Lear and his daughter—and every other person in the play—inhabit. Any part of this lifeworld may be thematized, of course; it may be brought out into the open as a topic of discussion. That is what Cordelia does; under duress, she shifts from what Jürgen Habermas calls communicative action to a level he calls discourse, a level that reveals the relationship between the personal and the social as well as their underlying cultural presuppositions. Because Lear refuses to grasp the obvious, the narrative progress of the play is temporarily interrupted and permanently veers off course. Although on occasion we can thematize aspects of our lifeworld, the lifeworld as a whole cannot be subject to scrutiny; it is the totality of certainties, skills, practices, and interpretative frames that we take for granted as we each find our way in the everyday worlds that form the changing horizons of our experience. I take it for granted that too many cooks spoil the broth; telephoning is a skill I do not puzzle over; waiting patiently in line is a social behavior I practice without thinking; with no special effort, I interpret the intimacy of a couple’s relationship by the way they publicly behave toward each other.The lifeworld, a concept initiated by Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Alfred Schütz, Martin Heidegger, and Jürgen Habermas, has been largely neglected by rhetorical theorists and critics. It is the purpose of this paper to show that remedying this neglect opens up fruitful avenues of critical practice and theory. I proceed, first, by defining the lifeworld. Next, I shift perspectives: I analyze how collectivities make sense of their lives by telling stories about themselves grounded in their lifeworld values. It is in the lifeworld’s role in storytelling that, I claim, Aristotle’s Rhetoric becomes an important part of the picture. This is because the Rhetoric is, at bottom, a theory of the way lifeworld values enter into the public sphere. This characterization of the Rhetoric permits us to reconcile two important instantiations of the lifeworld, Habermas’s and Aristotle’s, a reconciliation in which communicative action becomes a special case of rhetorical interaction. Finally, from the perspective of the lifeworld, I reflect on the significance of an exemplary case of the construction of collective identity, the Selma march. [End Page 119]Defining the LifeworldEdmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences contains the first explicit philosophical analysis of the lifeworld as “the world that is constantly pregiven, valid constantly and in advance as existing.... Every end presupposes it; even the universal end of knowing it in scientific truth presupposes it, and in advance” (1970, 382). Because the lifeworld is presupposed in everyday communication, it can be entered only by disciplined reflection: “Contemplation is privileged to the extent that it reveals the structures of the world and has them as theme” (1973, 65). Although the lifeworld... (shrink)

This paper argues that history differs from natural science in relying on folk psychology and so narrative explanations. In narratives, actions, beliefs, and pro-attitudes are joined by conditional and volitional connections. Conditional connections exist when beliefs and pro-attitudes pick up themes from one another Volitional connections exist when agents command themselves to do something having decided to do it because of a pro-attitude they hold. The paper defends the epistemic legitimacy of narratives by arguing we have legitimate grounds for postulating (...) conditional and volitional connections since they are given to us by a folk psychology we accept as true. (shrink)