Marya Schechtman takes issue with analytic philosophy's emphasis on the first sort of question to the exclusion of the second.

Can we understand what makes someone the same person without understanding what it is to be a person? Prereflectively we might not think so, but philosophers often accord these questions separate treatments, with personal-identity theorists claiming the first question and free-will theorists the second. Yet much of what is of interest to a person—the possibility of survival over time, compensation for past hardships, concern for future projects, or moral responsibility—is not obviously intelligible from the perspective of either question alone. Marya (...) Schechtman encourages us to adopt a more unified perspective. (shrink)

This book is based on the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1982. It offers a new approach to the philosophical understanding of a person, taking as fundamental the process of living as a person, and emphasising the continuity and development across time of an individual life.

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one's action-guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer to core feminist concerns about autonomy.

Concern for human vulnerability seems to be at the heart of bioethical inquiry, but the concept of vulnerability is under-theorized in the bioethical literature. The aim of this article is to show why bioethics needs an adequately theorized and nuanced conception of vulnerability. We first review approaches to vulnerability in research ethics and public health ethics, and show that the bioethical literature associates vulnerability with risk of harm and exploitation, and limited capacity for autonomy. We identify some of the challenges (...) emerging from this literature: in particular, how to reconcile universal human vulnerability with a context-sensitive analysis of specific kinds and sources of vulnerability; and how to reconcile obligations to protect vulnerable persons with obligations to respect autonomy. We then briefly survey some of the theoretical resources available within the philosophical literature to address these challenges, and to assist in understanding the conceptual connections between vulnerability and related concepts such as harm, exploitation, needs, and autonomy. We also sketch out a taxonomy of sources and kinds of vulnerability. Finally, we consider the implications for policy evaluation of making vulnerability an explicit and central focus of bioethics. Our investigation is in the form of a broad survey motivating a research agenda rather than a detailed analysis. (shrink)

We argue that companion friendship is not importantly marked by self-disclosure as understood in either of these two ways. One's close friends need not be markedly similar to oneself, as is claimed by the mirror account, nor is the role of private information in establishing and maintaining intimacy important in the way claimed by the secrets view. Our claim will be that the mirror and secrets views not only fail to identify features that are in part constitutive of close or (...) companion friendship, but that they miss the mark quite broadly and fail to capture anything significant and distinctive about the ways in which friendship has an impact on the self. The article will proceed as follows. In the first section we outline our account of the self in friendship. In the next two sections we examine the mirror and secrets views and develop our own view in counterpoint to these. In the final section we defend our own account by showing how it provides the governing conditions which do distinguish friendship from other kinds of relations between persons. (shrink)

Everyone loves a good story. But does everyone live a good story? It has frequently been asserted by philosophers, psychologists and others interested in understanding the distinctive nature of human existence that our lives do, or should, take a narrative form. Over the last few decades there has been a steady and growing focus on this narrative approach within philosophical discussions of personal identity, resulting in a wide range of narrative identity theories. While the narrative approach has shown great promise (...) as a tool for addressing longstanding and intractable problems of personal identity, it has also given rise to much suspicion. Opponents of this approach charge it with overstating or distorting the structure of actual lives. (shrink)

In this paper we defend the notion of narrative identity against Galen Strawson's recent critique. With reference to Elyn Saks's memoir of her schizophrenia, we question the coherence ofStrawsons conception of the Episodic self and show why the capacity for narrative integration is important for a flourishing life. We aho argue that Scú put pressure on narrative theories that specify unduly restncúve constraints on self-constituting narratives, and chrify the need to distinguish identity from autonomy.

Varieties of Narrative Analysis presents a broad spectrum of approaches to the empirical analysis of stories and storytelling. Leading researchers from different disciplines provide richly illustrated discussions of how they actually conduct narrative analysis from their diverse perspectives. The book's chapters focus on different ways of doing data analysis, not data collection, although the two are related in practice. The narrative material presented ranges from media accounts, life stories, and quantitative content analysis, to storytelling occasions, embodiment, emotionality, and narrative's diverse (...) institutional settings. Chapter coverage is comprised of background information, a discussion of methods of analysis, and illustrations of how to interpret narratives. The book is organized into three parts-analyzing stories, analyzing storytelling, and analyzing stories in society. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that there is a normative aspect to self-control that is not captured by the purely procedural account to be drawn from dual process theories of cognition – which we only uncover when we consider what self-control is for and why it is valuable. For at least a significant sub-group of addicts their loss of control over their drug use may not be due to a lack or depletion of cognitive resources. Rather it may be that (...) they have little confidence in their ability to exert control over their circumstances and shape the life they would value having and the person they would value being. (shrink)

Being in Time examines philosophical treatments of time and self-consciousness in relation to concepts of narrative, focusing on the literary aspects of philosophical writing. Lloyd shows how philosophy bears on the human and emotional aspects of the experience of time which are often neglected by the history of philosophy. Starting with Augustine's treatment of the ways in which time makes him a 'problem to himself', the book traces the themes of unity and the experience of fragmentation and loss as expressed (...) by Descartes, Hume and Kant. The idea of the past as 'lost' is explored through Bergson's philosophy of time and Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return. The book concludes with a discussion of philosophical aspects of themes of self-consciousness, memory and writing in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and the novels of Virginia Woolf. (shrink)

Focusing on four cases presented by Lloyd Wells, M.D., this paper addresses the relationship of clinical psychopathology to the philosophical concept of narrative identity. The paper begins with a review of the debate among historians, literary critics, and philosophers over the referential status of narrative identity, that is, whether the narrative self is a fictive structure unrelated to lived life or whether ordinary life is in fact lived narratively. Agreeing with those philosophers who argue for the reference of narrative identity (...) to actual life, the author analyzes the four cases from the perspective of narrative identity to determine what light this philosophical concept sheds on the various psychopathologies. Then, having used the philosophical concept to illuminate psychopathology, he reverses direction and questions what psychopathology has to offer philosophy and its notion of narrative identity. The author argues both that the philosophical concept of narrative identity contributes to our understanding of psychopathology and that psychopathology offers challenges to the philosophical notion of narrative identity. (shrink)

This article explores the notion of the dislocated self following deep brain stimulation (DBS) and concludes that when personal identity is understood in dynamic, narrative, and relational terms, the claim that DBS is a threat to personal identity is deeply problematic. While DBS may result in profound changes in behaviour, mood and cognition (characteristics closely linked to personality), it is not helpful to characterize DBS as threatening to personal identity insofar as this claim is either false, misdirected or trivially true. (...) The claim is false insofar as it misunderstands the dynamic nature of identity formation. The claim is misdirected at DBS insofar as the real threat to personal identity is the discriminatory attitudes of others towards persons with motor and other disabilities. The claim is trivially true insofar as any dramatic event or experience integrated into one’s identity-constituting narrative could then potentially be described as threatening. From the perspective of relational personal identity, when DBS dramatically disrupts the narrative flow, this disruption is best examined through the lens of agency. For illustrative purposes, the focus is on DBS for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. (shrink)