Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility
- Authors:
- Publisher:
- 2010
Summary
Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility is about why and how identifying ourselves by means of narrative makes it possible for us to be responsible, morally and otherwise. The book begins as an investigation into how it is that we can hold people responsible for who they are, despite the fact that we have almost no control over our lives in our formative years. It explains the relation between representation, personal identity, and self-knowledge, demonstrating how awareness of the vulnerability of our identity as persons is the origin of our capacity for the cathartic revision of a self-identifying narrative which is the condition of moral awareness.
Innovative in its interdisciplinary juxtaposition of ethics, moral psychology, literary theory and literature, Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility develops a sophisticated and comprehensive account of human nature. This book offers an intuitively satisfying and humane yet rigorous account of why and how we think of ourselves as simultaneously free and constrained by nature. Its fundamental thesis, the mediation of narrative representation between agent and the world, suggests new answers to old problems in moral psychology, such as the question of free will and responsibility.
With a more literary style than many philosophy texts, it works through a series of interconnected problems of as much interest to a thoughtful layperson as to academic philosophers.
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Bibliographic data
- Copyright year
- 2010
- ISBN-Print
- 978-0-7391-2593-9
- ISBN-Online
- 978-1-4616-3385-3
- Publisher
- Lexington, Lanham
- Language
- English
- Pages
- 265
- Product type
- Book Titles
Table of contents
- Table of Contents No access
- Acknowledgments No access
- Introduction No access
- Chapter 1: Frankfurt and Second-Order Evaluation No access
- Chapter 2: The Rational Wanton No access
- Chapter 3: Charles Taylor and the Nature of Desire No access
- Chapter 4: Desire and Personal Identity No access
- Chapter 5: The Value of Fantasy No access
- Chapter 6: Self-Knowledge and Narrative No access
- Chapter 7: Responsibility for Self No access
- Chapter 8: Plato on Mimesis No access
- Chapter 9: Vicarious Emotion and Pleasure No access
- Chapter 10: Aristotle on Mimesis: Aesthetic Pleasure No access
- Chapter 11: Ways of Being No access
- Chapter 12: Description, Interpretation, and Evaluation No access
- Chapter 13: Exemption from Responsibility No access
- Chapter 14: P. F. Strawson No access
- Chapter 15: "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil" No access
- Chapter 16: The Limits of the Moral Community No access
- Chapter 17: Richard Wollheim: Retribution and Reparation No access
- Chapter 18: Melanie Klein: Tragedy and Morality No access
- Bibliography of Works Cited No access Pages 257 - 260
- Index No access Pages 261 - 265





