Volume 37, Issue 1, January 2011
Fischer's Way and Our Stories
Ben Bradley
Pages 47-62
Narrativity, Freedom, and Redeeming the Past
Many philosophers endorse the view that global or “narrative” features of a life at least partly determine its value. For instance, a life in which the subject redeems her past failures and sacrifices with later successes is thought to be better, ceteris paribus, than one in which her later successes are unrelated to her previous failures. In this paper I distinguish some views about narrative value, including Fischer’s views about the importance of free will for narrative value, and raise a number of problems for the idea of narrative value.