The condition of postmodernity has been associated with the depreciation of narratives. Here it is argued that stories play a primordial role in human self-creation, underpinning more abstract discourses such as mathematics, logic and science. This thesis is defended telling a story of the evolution of European culture from Ancient Greece to the present, including an account of the rise of the notion of culture and its relation to the development of history, thereby showing how stories function to justify beliefs, (...) situate people as agents within history and orient them to create the future. (shrink)

This classic and controversial book examines the roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in modern life, and proposes a path for its recovery.

Narrative thinking -- Narrative thinking about one's past -- Grief : a case study -- Narrative thinking about one's future -- Self-forgiveness : a case study -- The narrative sense of self -- Narrative, truth, life, and fiction.

The view that narrative artworks can offer insights into our lives, in particular, into the nature of the emotions, has gained increasing popularity in recent years. However, talk of narrative often involves reference to a perspective or point of view, which indicates a more fundamental mechanism at work. In this article, I argue that our understanding of the emotions is incomplete without adequate attention to the perspectival structures in which they are embedded. Drawing on Bennett Helm’s theory of emotion, I (...) argue that the narrative view fails to take into account the influence of perspective on the emotions. In order to address this gap in our understanding of the emotions, I highlight a mode of engagement with literature that prioritizes the perspectival features of a work. Focusing on lyric poetry, I argue that non-narrative artworks are those best placed to highlight this fundamental aspect of our emotional experiences. (shrink)

Claims that the self and experience in general are narrative in structure are increasingly common, but it is not always clear what such claims come down to. In this paper, I argue that if the view is to be distinctive, the element of narrativity must be taken as literally as possible. If we do so, and explore the consequences of thinking about our selves and our lives in this manner, we shall see that the narrative view fundamentally confusues art and (...) life. We learn from art itself that our selves and lives transcend narratives and that thinking in a narrative manner ignores the rich complexity of individual persons. Footnotes1 I am grateful to John Cottingham, Galen Strawson, Bart Streumer and Douglas Farland for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. (shrink)

The basic approach to understanding shared agency has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have some reason for (...) continuing to participate in the joint action in the face of conflicting reasons? This is particularly pressing in cases of joint actions that unfold over long periods of time. There are a variety of ways that the problem of stability and depth of shared intention might be addressed. We review some of those ways in section 1. We do not intend to challenge these approaches. Instead, in this article, we want to suggest that narrative is an additional, perhaps in some cases a predominant, way in which stability and depth are achieved. According to some theories, narrative plays a crucial role in the development of the self. Our suggestion is that the narratives we tell about our joint projects contribute to the development of a stable and deep “we.”. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy.

Philosophers currently speak of the growth of knowledge only in the context of scientific enquiry, and concentrate exclusively on the growth of prepositional knowledge. That this is mistaken can be seen from a consideration of the knowledge acquired from fictional literature. There are many different things that are learned from fiction. Certainly people acquire prepositional beliefs and knowledge about the actual world from fiction, but they also acquire strategic and cognitive skills, emphatic beliefs and knowledge, and values of one sort (...) or another. These are all acquired in interestingly different ways which are detailed in the body of the paper. (shrink)

Philosophers currently speak of the growth of knowledge only in the context of scientific enquiry, and concentrate exclusively on the growth of prepositional knowledge. That this is mistaken can be seen from a consideration of the knowledge acquired from fictional literature. There are many different things that are learned from fiction. Certainly people acquire prepositional beliefs and knowledge about the actual world from fiction, but they also acquire strategic and cognitive skills, emphatic beliefs and knowledge, and values of one sort (...) or another. These are all acquired in interestingly different ways which are detailed in the body of the paper. (shrink)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that great works of literature have an impact on people's lives. Well known literary characters—Oedipus, Hamlet, Faustus, Don Quixote—acquire iconic or mythic status and their stories, in more or less detail, are revered and recalled often in contexts far beyond the strictly literary. At the level of national literatures, familiar characters and plots are assimilated into a wider cultural consciousness and help define national stereotypes and norms of behaviour. In the English speaking world, Shakespeare's (...) plays or the novels of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, and Trollope, provide imaginative material that reverberates in people's lives every bit as much as do the great historical figures, like Julius Caesar, Elizabeth I, Horatio Nelson, or Winston Churchill. What is striking is how often fictional characters from the literary tradition—like the well-loved Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Pip, Tess of the d'Ubervilles—enter readers' lives at a highly personal level. They become, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, our ‘friends’, and for many readers the lives of these characters become closely entwined with their own. Happy and unhappy incidents in the fictional worlds are held up against similar incidents in the real lives of readers and such readers take inspiration from the courage, ingenuity, or good fortune of their fictional heroines and heroes. Nowhere is it more true that life imitates art. (shrink)

Do the same epistemic standards govern scientific and religious belief? Or should science and religion operate in completely independent epistemic spheres? Commentators have recently been divided on William James’s answer to this question. One side depicts “The Will to Believe” as offering a separate-spheres defense of religious belief in the manner of Galileo. The other contends that “The Will to Believe” seeks to loosen the usual epistemic standards so that religious and scientific beliefs can both be justified by a unitary (...) set of evidentiary rules. I argue that James did build a unitary epistemology but not by loosening cognitive standards. In his psychological research, he had adopted the Comtian view that hypotheses and regulative assumptions play a crucial role in the context of discovery even though they must be provisionally adopted before they can be supported by evidence. “The Will to Believe” relies on this methodological point to achieve a therapeutic goal—to convince despairing Victorians that religious faith can be reconciled with a scientific epistemology. James argues that the prospective theist is in the same epistemic situation with respect to the “religious hypothesis” as the scientist working in the context of discovery. (shrink)

Decoupling a modestly construed Narrative Self Shaping Hypothesis from Strong Narrativism this paper attempts to motivate devoting our intellectual energies to the former. Section one briefly introduces the notions of self-shaping and rehearses reasons for thinking that self-shaping, in a suitably tame form, is, at least to some extent, simply unavoidable for reflective beings. It is against this background that the basic commitments of a modest Narrative Self-Shaping Hypothesis are articulated. Section two identifies a foundational commitment—the central tenet—of all Strong (...) Narrativist proposals, those that posit a necessary link between narrative self-shaping and narrative self-experience. As will be shown, in the hands of Strong Narrativists the latter notion is unpacked in stronger or weaker ways by appeal to the notion of implicit Narrativizing. Section three reminds the reader of Strawson’s challenge to Strong Narrativism. It is revealed that Strawson’s objections are most effective if they target Strong Narrativism’s central tenet construed as a phenomenological revelation about what is necessary for self-experience and not merely the psychological Narrativity thesis, construed as an empirical hypothesis about typical Narrativizing proclivities. Having set the stage, section four critically examines two different strategies, pursued by Rudd and Schechtman respectively, for escaping the horns Strawson’s dilemma poses for Strong Narrativism. In the end both strategies invoke the notion of implicit Narrativizing at a crucial juncture. Section five reveals that a substantive proposal about what implicit Narrativizing might be is lacking, hence we have no reason to believe that it actually occurs. It is concluded that, as things stand, Strong Narrativism has no way of avoiding the horns of Strawson’s dilemma. Brief concluding remarks in the final section are a reminder why, despite their modesty, softer versions of the NSSH—when coupled with a developmental proposal about the narrative basis of our folk psychological competence—are non-trivial and worthy of further development and investigation. (shrink)

ArgumentA number of theorists have proposed simulation theories of empathy. A review of these theories shows that, despite the fact that one version of the simulation theory can avoid a number of problems associated with such approaches, there are further reasons to doubt whether simulation actually explains empathy. A high-level simulation account of empathy, distinguished from the simulation theory of mindreading, can avoid problems associated with low-level (neural) simulationist accounts; but it fails to adequately address two other problems: the diversity (...) problem and the starting problem. It is argued that a narrative approach to empathy obviates all these problems and offers a more parsimonious account. (shrink)

I argue for a broad education in narratives as a way to address several problems found in moral psychology and social cognition. First, an education in narratives will address a common problem of narrowness or lack of diversity, shared by virtue ethics and the simulation theory of social cognition. Secondly, it also solves the ?starting problem? involved in the simulation approach. These discussions also relate directly to theories of empathy with special significance given to situational empathy.

This paper explicates and defends some of William James' more controversial claims in ‘The Will to Believe’. After showing some of the weaknesses in standard interpretations of James' position, I turn to James' Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience to spell out in more detail James' account of the nature of the attitudes of belief, doubt, and disbelief and link them to an account of the subject. In so doing, the moral force of the argument comes to (...) the fore by casting the question ‘Can we believe at will?’ in a new light. Through a discussion of the conversion experiences of The Varieties of Religious Experience and the kinds of self-transformations in which beliefs that once appeared dead become live that appear throughout James' psychology, the moral urgency of James' position in ‘The Will to Believe’ is clarified. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been (...) to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the “real world.” Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world “as it is.” There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning, appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for “a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology.”. (shrink)

_The Performance of Reading_ argues that there are distinct analogies between "silent" reading and artistic performance, and so fashions the new role of the reader as performer. An original and insightful exploration of the act of reading by the leading scholar in the field. Discusses the history of reading and the transitions from reading aloud to reading silently, and the changing role of literature as communal, active experience to a more private endeavor.

"For description and defense of the narrative configurations of everyday life, and of the practical and social character of those narratives, there is no better treatment than Time, Narrative, and History.... a clear, judicious, and truthful account, provocative from beginning to end." —Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology "... a superior work of philosophy that tells a unique and insightful story about narrative." —Quarterly Journal of Speech.

_The Performance of Reading_ argues that there are distinct analogies between "silent" reading and artistic performance, and so fashions the new role of the reader as performer. An original and insightful exploration of the act of reading by the leading scholar in the field. Discusses the history of reading and the transitions from reading aloud to reading silently, and the changing role of literature as communal, active experience to a more private endeavor.

Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis is the only book to combine cultural theory and environmental philosophy. In it, Arran Gare analyses the conjunction between the environmental crisis, the globalisation of capitalism and the disintegration of the culture of modernity. It explains the paradox of growing concern for the environment and the paltry achievements of environmental movements. Through a critique of the philosophies underlying approaches to the environmental crisis, Arran Gare puts forward his own, controversial theory of a new postmodern world (...) view. This would be the foundation for the environmental movement to succeed. Arran Gare's work will be a vital reading for advanced students of environmental studies, as well as for environmental philosophers and cultural theorists. (shrink)

I explore the possibility that there are interesting and illuminating paralleIs to be drawn between issues central to the philosophical literature on scientific thought experiments (TE’s) and issues central to the phlilosophical literature on standard fictional narratives. I examine three related questions: (a) To what extent are TE’s (like) standard fictional narratives? (b) Is the understanding of TE’s like the understanding of standard fictional narratives? (c) Most significantly, are there illuminating paralIeIs to be drawn between the ‘epistemological problem’ of TE’s (...) in science, and epistemological problems that attend some of the cognitive claims made for standard works of fiction? If so, are strategies used to defend the epistemic virtues of TE’s equally available to defend the cognitive claims of works of fiction? In addressing the third of these questions, I spell out the range of responses elicited by the epistemological problern of TE’s in science and suggest that at least one of this responses might bear upon the credibility of the cognitive claims of fiction. (shrink)

As a grand narrative of progress, the utopian project of modernity is primarily concerned with notions of rationalism, universalism, and the development of a metalanguage. The triumph of the Moderate Enlightenment has seen logics of domination, accumulation and individualism incorporated into the project of modernity, with these logics giving rise to globalised capitalism as the metalanguage of modernity and neoliberal economics as the grand narrative of rational progress. The project of modernity is all but complete, requiring only the formality of (...) an end. However, rather than utopia, the foreseeable endpoint of modernity is environmental collapse, with neoliberal economics also serving as a grand narrative of environmental destruction. As an anti-modern response, postmodernism has been a triumphant failure. While there is much to be gained from the postmodern critique of modernity, its incredulity towards metanarratives has left it incapable of forming an adequate response to modernity, especially in regards to action on climate change. Postmodernism is better characterized as a crisis located within modernity itself and it will be argued that rather than the pursuit of the modern or the post-modern, we need to re-imagine ourselves as proto- historical to overcome the impasse of late-capitalism. (shrink)

Some authors defend literary cognitivism – the view that literary fiction is cognitively valuable – by drawing an analogy between cognitive values of thought experiments and literary fiction. In this paper my aim is to analyse the reasons for drawing this analogy and to see how far the analogy can be stretched. In the second part, I turn to the claim put forward by literary anti-cognitivists according to which literature can at best be the source of hypotheses, not of knowledge. (...) I challenge this claim by showing that hypotheses can have valuable cognitive benefits on their own, thus hoping to restore cognitive benefits readers get from literature.Neki autori brane književni kognitivizam – stajalište da književna fikcija ima spoznajnu vrijednost – povlačeći analogiju između spoznajne vrijednosti misaonih eksperimenata i književne fikcije. U ovome ću radu analizirati razloge za ovu analogiju te vidjeti koliko se njen doseg može proširiti. U drugome dijelu razmotrit ću tvrdnju književnih antikognitivista prema kojoj književnost u najboljem slučaju može biti samo izvor hipoteza, a ne znanja. Ovu ću tvrdnju dovesti u pitanje pokazujući da hipoteze same mogu imati vrijedne spoznajne koristi, u nadi da se na taj način mogu obnoviti spoznajne koristi koje čitatelji pronalaze u književnosti.Certains auteurs défendent le cognitivisme littéraire – position selon laquelle la fiction littéraire a une valeur cognitive – en établissant une analogie entre les valeurs cognitives de l’expérience mentale et la fiction littéraire. Dans cet article, j’analyserai les raisons de cette analogie et verrai jusqu’où cette analogie peut s’étendre. Dans la seconde partie, j’examinerai l’affirmation des anti-cognitivistes littéraires selon lesquels la littérature peut tout au plus être une source d’hypothèses et non pas du savoir. Je mets cette affirmation au défi en montrant que les hypothèses à elles seules peuvent avoir de précieux avantages cognitifs, dans l’espoir de restaurer ainsi les avantages cognitifs que les lecteurs tirent de la littérature.Einige Verfasser verteidigen den literarischen Kognitivismus – einen Standpunkt, nach welchem die literarische Fiktion erkenntnismäßig ersprießlich ist – indem sie eine Parallele zwischen den Erkenntniswerten der Gedankenexperimente und der Literaturfiktion ziehen. In dieser Schrift fasse ich den Vorsatz, die Ursachen für diese Parallelisierung auszukundschaften wie auch zu ermitteln, inwieweit sich diese Analogie ausdehnen lässt. In dem zweiten Teil wende ich mich der vonseiten der literarischen Antikognitivisten vorgebrachten Behauptung zu, welcher zufolge die Lieratur günsigstensfalls eine Hypothesen- und keineswegs eine Wissensquelle zu sein vermag. Ich hinterfrage diese These, indem ich die Anschauung erhärte, dass Hypothesen über eigene wertvolle erkenntnisbezogene Vorzüge verfügen können; all dies in der Hoffnung, kognitive Vorteile herzustellen, welche die Leserschaft aus der Literatur herausliest. (shrink)

Many readers will be familiar with the power of stories to stimulate rich, ethically-focussed philosophical enquiry with communities of children and young people. This paper presents a view of the relationship between ethics and narrative that attempts to explain why this is the case. It is not an accident that moral matters are illuminated in stories, nor is the explanation for this fitness for purpose merely pragmatic, or a matter of convention. Narrative is at the heart of learning how to (...) live a good live and living that life. Unlike other forms of organising human experience, such as mathematics or science, narrative represents ethical experience particularly well. This is possible because of the logical structures of human experience that narrative successfully communicates and because of the human faculties that it successfully engages , which are the faculties we use in ethical life. Understood in this way, narrative is both a source, and a method of ethical knowledge and understanding. The implication of this claim is that narrative is is not only useful as a stimulus for ethical enquiry in the way in which delegates may be familiar. According to my account, telling and being told stories and exploring narrative features such as character and setting constitute a form of ethical enquiry in their own right. These activities require us to engage the same faculties at work in ethical life and in doing so, we gain ethically relevant experiences that reinforce, challenge and enlarge what we know and understand about the ethical world. However, we do not strive to grasp propositional knowledge through engaging with narratives as a source and method of knowledge and understanding. Books, plays and films on my account, do not have ‘a moral of the story’ that must be grasped and then internalised. What we learn through engagement with narrative is ethical perceptiveness. Perceptiveness in this sense, is knowing how to read and respond to the ethically salient features of a text or an everyday experience. It is a function of the use of our emotion and imagination in conjunction with the intellect. In light of these claims, I advocate ‘Narrative Ethical Enquiry’, a pedagogy that aims at three things I consider to be constitutive of perceptiveness: Ethical awareness: The active and self-conscious identification of the ethical content in stories. Narrative competence: The encouragement of sophisticated acts of giving and receiving stories, as an integral part of ethics education and not just as the basis for an exploration of issues in some other gear e.g. philosophical, legal, scientific, religious etc. Self-conscious enquiry: The recognition – by learners and teachers – of the potential of narratives and active use of narrative to gain ethical knowledge and understanding. Although ethical enquiry in PwC often begins with a story, this does not mean that narrative has been optimised in that educational encounter. Often in a PwC class that begins with a story, there is a hasty move made from an exploration of the detailed content of the story to the identification of one or two ethical concepts followed by the pursuit of understanding through conceptual analysis, the construction of prima facie axioms, principles and other theoretical constructs. All of which operate at a suitably high level of generality and abstraction. This is what philosophy does well, but in in doing so in ethical enquiry, it overlooks narrative features of a stimulus that can offer ethical illumination. Features such as the time and place in which the story takes place; the intentional and emotional states of certain characters; the contingency of certain events and the necessity of others; the uniqueness of the story as a singular whole including its particular details and simultaneously, the generic patterns of tragedy or parody that it assumes. An intellectualistic philosophical engagement with a story will typically neglect the faculties of emotion and imagination that enable us to fully access the ethical dimension of a story and in turn allow us to navigate the ethical dimension of every day life. I propose an approach to ethical enquiry that draws on the self-conscious and systematic clarity of philosophy and the richness, complexity and immediacy of narrative. Philosophical and narrative modes of understanding can - and often do - complement one another in PwC. In proposing Narrative Ethical Enquiry I simply advocate that this be acknowledged, understood and capitalised upon. (shrink)

By revealing the centrality of stories to action, to social life and to inquiry together with the implicit assumptions in polyphonic stories about the nature of humans, of life and of physical reality, this paper examines the potential of stories to transform civilization. Focussing on the failure of environmentalists so far in the face of the global ecological crisis, it is shown how ethics and political philosophy could be reconceived and radical ecology reformulated and reinvigorated by appreciating and exploiting the (...) potential of stories. This could enable radical ecologists to effect the major social and economic changes necessary to meet the global ecological crisis. What we need, it is argued, is a new, polyphonic grand narrative. (shrink)

Some philosophers contend that to effectively address problems such our global environmental crisis, humans must collectively embrace a polyphonic, environmentalist grand narrative, very different from the narratives accepted by modernists. Cultural theorists who write about metamodernism likewise discuss the recent return to a belief in narratives, and contend that our society’s current approach to narratives is very different from that of the modernists. In this paper, I articulate these philosophers’ and cultural theorists’ positions, and I highlight and explore interconnections between (...) them. Additionally, I argue that if the authors I discuss are correct, then we morally ought to embrace a metamodernist, polyphonic, environmentalist grand narrative, in order to effectively address an array of global crises. Such a grand narrative is a necessary ingredient of an adequate global ethics. (shrink)