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The paper offers a mildly deflationary account of narrative, drawing attention to the minimal, thus easily satisfied, conditions of narrativity and showing that many of the more striking claims about narrative are either poorly supported or refer to distinct classes of narrative—usually literary or fictional—which provide a misleading paradigm for narration in general. An enquiry into structural, referential, pragmatic, and valuebased features of narrative helps circumscribe the limits of narration and the test case of the narrative definition of the self is examined and shown to yield rather less that is often claimed.

The claim that selves are narratively constituted has attained considerable currency in both analytic and continental philosophy. However, a set of increasingly standard objections to narrative identity are also emerging. In this paper, I focus on metaphysically realist versions of narrative identity theory, showing how they both build on and differ from their neo-Lockean counterparts. But I also argue that narrative realism is implicitly committed to a four-dimensionalist, temporal-parts ontology of persons. That exposes narrative realism to the charge that the narratively constituted self, on the one hand, and the self that is the object of much of our everyday self-reference and self-experience, on the other, can't be the same thing. This conclusion may well force narrativists to abandon metaphysical realism about narrative selves—which, in turn, may leave the invocation of ‘narrativity’ as identity-constituting somewhat under-motivated.

Traditionally, questions about consciousness and subjectivity are treated separately from questions about the self and identity. But sometimes 'the self' is spoken of as 'the subject,' which suggests that the first-person perspective may be constituted in the same way as the self. Narrative provides a powerful model of the self in contemporary psychology, philosophy of mind, and moral psychology. On some versions of narrative theory, narrative is held fundamental not only to self-understanding but to the phenomenology of the first-person point of view, too. I call this approach the narrative self-subject model. I argue that the narrative model does not apply to subjectivity, and that the narrative self should be distinguished from the 'I' of the first- person perspective. Roughly, this is because first-person narratives employ the first-person pronoun 'I' to identify some person, but the distinctive features of subjectivity are marked by a different, non-identifying use of the pronoun 'I'.

Is the self narratively constructed? There are many who would answer yes to the question. Dennett (1991) is, perhaps, the most famous proponent of the view that the self is narratively constructed, but there are others, such as Velleman (2006), who have followed his lead and developed the view much further. Indeed, the importance of narrative to understanding the mind and the self is currently being lavished with attention across the cognitive sciences (Dautenhahn, 2001; Hutto, 2007; Nelson, 2003). Emerging from this work, there appear to be a variety of ways in which we can think of the narrative construction of the self and the relationship between the narrative self and the embodied agent. I wish to examine two such ways in this paper. The first I shall call the abstract narrative account, this is because its proponents take the narrative self to be an abstraction (Dennett, 1991; Velleman, 2006). Dennett, for example, refers to the self as a centre of narrative gravity, to be thought of as analogous to a mathematical conception of the centre of gravity of an object. The second I shall call the embodied narrative account and this is the view that the self is constituted both by an embodied consciousness whose experiences are available for narration and narratives themselves, which can play a variety of roles in the agent’s psychological life.

Although Paul Ricoeur's writings are widely and appreciatively read by theologians, this is the first book to offer a full, sympathetic yet critical account of Ricoeur's theory of narrative interpretation and its contribution to theology. Unlike many previous studies of Ricoeur, Part I argues that Ricoeur's hermeneutics must be viewed in the light of his overall philosophical agenda, as a fusion and continuation of the unfinished projects of Kant and Heidegger. Particularly helpful is the focus on Ricoeur's recent narrative theory as the context in which Ricoeur deals with problems of time and the creative imagination; and it becomes clear that narrative stands at the crossroads of Ricoeur's search for the meaning of human being as well as his search for the meaning of texts. Part II examines the potential of Ricoeur's narrative theory for resolving certain theological problems, such as the dichotomy betweens the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. In so doing Vanhoozer relates Ricoeur's work to that of theologians such as Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Pannenberg, Frei and Tracy.

Introduction -- Part I: The main road -- Fundamental loyalties -- Theology, hermeneutics, and Ricoeur's double life -- Part II: Detour -- Prefiguration : the critical arc and descriptive identity -- Configuration : the narrative arc and narrative identity -- Refiguration : Ricoeur's "little ethics" -- Part III: Return -- Chalcedonian hermeneutics -- Theological anthropology : removing brackets -- Conclusion.

Why Deleuze and Ricoeur? -- Fields for potential and possible connectors -- Investigative strategies -- Towards the cohesion of a life : chapter outline -- Problematizing the field of the self -- Between rigidification and dehiscence : context and counter-context -- Ancestry for the self in a problematic field -- Conceptual personae and the self -- Aporia of the inscrutability of the self -- Sweeney : philosophical bathyscope -- Critique on the kantian self -- Pretensions of the kantian self -- Divided self still surrounded by the mad and the replicant -- The narrative self -- Oneself as another or onselves as myself -- The narrative self : origins in Kant -- Appearance and exposition of the narrative self -- Working through narrative -- Towards an interrogation of the narrative self -- Questioning the narrative self through its progenitors -- Methodology : questioning back -- The narrative self in retrospect -- The poetic composition of the self : threefold mimesis -- Summary : problems for narrative identity -- Transversals between Ricoeur and Deleuze -- In the land of the larval selves -- Origins in Schelling -- Ontology of productivity -- The dogmatic image of thought -- The narrative self as twin multiplicities -- Dissolving the narrative self -- From multiplicity to the narrative self -- Obscure stammering for a new narrative self -- Between time and the self : a fractured I -- Laws in the germplasm of narrative : the dark precursor -- Narrative persona -- From debt to excess -- Ricoeur's dilemma of the self : substance or illusion? -- Deleuze and Aristotle : a disavowed affinity -- Interzone -- Between dark precursor and narrative self : gelassenheit -- Inhering problems for the becoming-narrative self -- An unguessed axis for narrative selves -- From excess to debt : evolving constraints to narrative identity -- Where to start, three stations : natality, personhood, narrative selfhood -- First constraint : proustian love and lack -- Narrative constraints : implications for the synthesis of the heterogeneous -- The poetic imagination within the evolving constraints of narrative productivity -- Where Deleuze was, there Ricoeur shall be? -- The narrative self : a badly posed question -- Second constraint : imagination within structure and obligation -- A self entombed in a debt to the past.

The narrative approach to identity has developed as a sophisticated philosophical response to the complexities and ambiguities of the human, lived situation, and is not – as has been naively suggested elsewhere – the imposition of a generic form of life or the attempt to imitate a fictional character. I argue that the narrative model of identity provides a more inclusive and exhaustive account of identity than the causal models employed by mainstream theorists of personal identity. Importantly for ethical subjectivity, the narrative model gives a central and irreducible role to the first-person perspective. I will draw the connection between narrative identity and ethical subjectivity by way of an exposition of work by Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman, and a brief consideration of Korsgaard’s work on practical identity and normative ethics. I argue that the first-person perspective – the reflective structure of human consciousness – arises from human embodiment, and therefore the model of identity required of embodied consciousness is more complex and irreducibly first-personal than that provided in a causal account. What is required is a self-constitution model of identity: a narrative model of identity.

In this chapter I discuss Charles Taylor's and Paul Ricoeur's theories of narrative identity and narratives as a central form of self-interpretation.1 Both Taylor and Ricoeur think that self-identity is a matter of culturally and socially mediated self-definitions, which are practically relevant for one's orientation in life.2 First, I will go through various characterisations that Ricoeur gives of his theory, and try to show to what extent they also apply to Taylor's theory. Then, I will analyse more closely Charles Taylor's, and in section three, Paul Ricoeur's views on narrative identity.

On Paul Ricoeur examines the later work of Paul Ricoeur, particularly his major work, Time and Narrative. The essays in this volume, including three pieces by Ricoeur, consider Time and Narrative, extending and developing the debate it has inspired. Time and Narrative is the finest example of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics and is one of the most significant works of philosophy published in the late twentieth century. Paul Ricoeur's study of the intertwining of time and narrative proposes and examines the possibility that narrative could remedy a fatal deficiency in any purely phenomenological approach. He analyzed both literary and historical writing, from Proust to Braudel, as well as key figures in the history of philosophy: Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. His own recognition of his limited success in expunging aporia opens onto the positive discovery of the importance of narrative identity, on which Ricoeur writeshere. An essential companion to Time and Narrative, this collection also provides an excellent introduction to Ricoeur's later work and to contemporary works in philosophical hermeneutics. It will be of major interest to philosophers, literary theorists, and historians.