- List of contributors
- Introduction: A Diversity of Selves
- History as Prologue: Western Theories of the Self
- What is it Like to be a Newborn?
- Self in the Brain
- The Embodied Self
- Bodily Awareness and Self‐Consciousness
- The Sense of Body Ownership
- Phenomenological Dimensions of Bodily Self‐Consciousness
- Witnessing from Here: Self-Awareness from a Bodily versus Embodied Perspective
- The Minimal Subject
- The No‐Self Alternative
- Buddhist Non‐Self: The No‐Owner's Manual
- Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of Self
- Personal Identity
- On What we are
- On Knowing one's Self
- The Narrative Self
- The Unimportance of Identity
- Self‐Control in Action
- Moral Responsibility and the Self
- The Structure of Self‐Consciousness in Schizophrenia
- Multiple Selves
- Autism and the Self
- The Self: Growth, Integrity, and Coming Apart
- Our Glassy Essence: The Fallible Self in Pragmatist Thought
- The Social Construction of Self
- The Dialogical Self: A Process of Positioning in Space and Time
- Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity, and the Research Process
- The Postmodern Self: An Essay on Anachronism and Powerlessness
- Self, Subjectivity, and the Instituted Social Imaginary
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines the narrative approach to self found in philosophy and related disciplines. The strongest versions of the narrative approach hold that both a person's sense of self and a person's life are narrative in structure, and this is called the hermeneutical narrative theory. This article provides a provisional picture of the content of the narrative approach and considers some important objections that have been raised to the narrative approach. It defends the view that the self constitutes itself in narrative and argues for something less than the hermeneutical view insofar as the narrative is less agency-oriented and without an overarching thematic unity.
Marya Schechtman, Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois, Chicago.
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