Theme
Narrative accounts of selfhood
have been a major, if heavily contested, feature of personal identity
theory in the last quarter-century, driven by the work of thinkers as
diverse as MacIntyre, Ricoeur, Schechtman, Dennett and Velleman. In the
last decade, it has further been claimed that Kierkegaard (despite
MacIntyre's controversial reading of him in After Virtue) also holds a
narrativist conception of the self - and that his work holds valuable
resources for getting to grips with the normative dimensions of
narrative identity. However, Kierkegaard's work also brings some of the
serious questions about narrative identity into stark focus:
- What makes the attainment of narrative identity
normative?
- Do selves exist prior to their
narration?
- How can the narrative self be something we both
are and are ethically enjoined to become?
- How can we understand our lives as a narrative
when the ending of our story - our death - is necessarily
unknown to us?
- Are metaphysically realist or anti-realist
versions of the narrative selfhood hypothesis more tenable - and what
of the claim that practical and metaphysical identity cannot be
separated at all?
- Are narrative conceptions of self consistent
with any strong form of free will?
This conference, organised under the auspices of the EU-funded FP7 project Selves In Time
aims to address some of these problems both within Kierkegaard Studies
and within the broader debate on narrative selfhood. Twenty-one papers
will be presented in the course of two days, in both parallel and
plenary sessions. Confirmed plenary speakers are:
