Time’s Passage and the Narrative Self

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-126
Author(s):  
Nancy S. Jecker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Life Stage ◽  
The Self ◽  
Medical Decisions ◽  
Extended Self ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
People With Dementia ◽  
Single Moment ◽  
Surrogate Decision

Chapter 4 explores the metaphor of life as a story and shows how it serves as a corrective for midlife bias by keeping attention directed to the whole of human life. It delineates epistemological, ontological, and normative components of narrative. Narrative framing of medical decisions incorporates the whole story of a person’s life (integrity); manages claims of the self at distinct time slices to serve the whole, temporally extended self (prudence); and lends itself to treating each life stage equally (fairness). In cases involving surrogate decision-making for people with dementia, narrative understanding directs us to a person’s complete life. It avoids basing decisions on a single moment (time slice) when an advance directive was executed. Rather than equating personal identity with a mature, midlife self, narrative conceptions of personal identity regard all life stages as constitutive of identity.

scholarly journals Extended self

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 63-85
Author(s):  
Miljana Milojevic
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
The Self ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Extended Self ◽  
Demarcation Line ◽  
Psychological Continuity ◽  
Group Minds ◽  
Extended Mind Thesis

In this paper I aim to show that in the debate about the nature of the self one concept, the concept of the cognitive self, has a theoretical primacy over other conceptual alternatives because of its connection with the concept of a person in the debate about personal identity. Consequently, I will offer a defence of the hypothesis that the Extended Mind thesis implies the Extended Cognitive Self thesis if we additionally assume Parfit?s Psychological criterium of personal identity. After I consider several counterarguments to the claim that the Extended Mind implies the Extended Self, I will offer their criticism and show that they either distort the original Extended Mind thesis or introduce hardly defensible metaphysical assumptions. To one such assumption, that claims that one mind can contain another, I will pay special attention. By careful examination it will be shown that such assumption can be kept only if the relation between the mereologically connected minds is such that prevents psychological continuity between them, while it has to be abandoned if there is a psychological continuity between such minds because it would produce numerous problems such as the problem of too many thinkers, the proliferation of minds, the concept of the person would become useless, etc. Also, these considerations will lead us to the clear demarcation line between those approaches that claim the possibility of group minds and those that claim that there are extended minds. Their key difference will be in taking contrary stances towards the relation of psychological continuity when it comes to different wide minds and their biological constituents. This will be one of the main results of this paper, together with the defence of the Extended Cognitive Self thesis.

scholarly journals Saying no (to a story): personal identity and negativity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tereza Matějčková
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Narrative Identity ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
The Self ◽  
Birth Certificates ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe concept of narrativity and narrative identity has two birth certificates: it is linked to the phenomenological tradition—beginning with Arendt’s “political phenomenology” —and to the tradition of German Idealism gradually slipping into existentialism. In this article, the author focuses on the latter tradition that helped to pave the way of the concept of narrative self. Key among the thinkers of Classical German Idealism has been Hegel, often considered the philosophical storyteller. Yet the author argues that Hegel’s concept of narrativity is not exclusively applied to the self and has hardly any role in the constitution of consciousness. This is the reason why Hegel (rather than thinkers who place the core of personal identity into narrativity) has the means to formulate a more convincing concept of the self and personal identity. The author does not deny that narrativity is seminal, both for leading a life as a human being and as a concrete person; however, originally consciousness and self-hood are born out of negativity. One enacts one’s selfhood, once one realizes that one has to interrupt narrativity, step in, refuse to live by it, or just ordinarily rephrase it consciously and by this appropriate it.

How to grow a self: development of the self in a Bayesian brain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateusz Wozniak
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Predictive Coding ◽  
Body Representation ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
The Self ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Bayesian Brain ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Complex Forms

The last two decades have brought several attempts to explain the self as a part of the Bayesian brain, typically within the framework of predictive coding. However, none of these attempts have looked comprehensively at the developmental aspect of self-representation. The goal of this paper is to argue that looking at the developmental trajectory is crucial for understanding the structure of an adult self-representation. The paper argues that the emergence of the self should be understood as an instance of conceptual development, which in the context of a Bayesian brain can be understood as a process of acquisition of new internal models of hidden causes of sensory input. The paper proposes how such models might emerge and develop over the course of human life by looking at different stages of development of bodily and extra-bodily self-representations. It argues that the self arises gradually in a series of discrete steps: from first-person multisensory representations of one’s body to third-person multisensory body representation, and from basic forms of the extended and social selves to progressively more complex forms of abstract self-representation. It discusses how each of them might emerge based on domain-general learning mechanisms, while also taking into account the potential role of innate representations. Finally it suggests how the conceptual structure of self-representation might inform the debate about the structure of self-consciousness.

Persons as Biological Processes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Sophie Meincke
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Biological Processes ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Single Moment ◽  
Ontological Framework ◽  
Biological Nature

Human persons exist longer than a single moment in time; they persist through time. However, so far it has not been possible to make this natural and widespread assumption metaphysically comprehensible. The philosophical debate on personal identity is rather stuck in a dilemma: reductionist theories explain personal identity away, while non-reductionist theories fail to give any informative account at all. This chapter argues that this dilemma emerges from an underlying commitment, shared by both sides in the debate, to an ontology that gives priority to static unchanging things. The claim defended here is that the dilemma of personal identity can be overcome if we acknowledge the biological nature of human persons and switch to a process-ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary. Human persons are biological higher-order processes rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated.

scholarly journals Phenomenological approaches to personal identity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakub Čapek ◽  
Sophie Loidolt
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
The Self ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The Social ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Continental Tradition ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Temporal Becoming

AbstractThis special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question (as suggested by thinkers such as MacIntyre, Ricœur and Taylor). These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: (a) debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; (b) questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and (c) the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective.

Self as One and Many Narratives

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Joseph Ulatowski ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Narrative Self ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
One And Many ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Work And Life

There are different approaches to the narrative self. I limit myself to one approach that argues narratives have an important role to play in our lives without it being true that a narrative constitutes and creates the self. My own position is broadly sympathetic with that view, but my interest lies with the question of whether there is truth in the claim that to create one’s self-narrative is to create oneself. I argue that a self-narrative may be multiply realised by the inner self—impressions and emotions—and the outer self—roles in work and life. I take an optimistic attitude to the idea that narrative provides a metaphor that may stimulate insight into the nature of self if we accept a plurality of narrative selves. This paper mines a vein of research on narratives for insights into selves without being bewitched into accepting implausible conclusions.

The Validity of the Norwegian Version of the Cognitive Function Instrument

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 217-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Michelet ◽  
Knut Engedal ◽  
Geir Selbæk ◽  
Anne Lund ◽  
Guro Hanevold Bjørkløf ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Cognitive Function ◽  
Cognitive Decline ◽  
Reference Group ◽  
Area Under The Curve ◽  
The Self ◽  
Norwegian Version ◽  
People With Dementia ◽  
Diagnosis Of Dementia ◽  
Proxy Version

Background/Aims: A timely diagnosis of dementia is important, and the Cognitive Function Instrument (CFI) is a newly developed instrument to screen for cognitive decline. The aim of this study was to evaluate the validity and internal consistency of the Norwegian version of the CFI. Methods: We included 265 participants with dementia, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), subjective cognitive impairment (SCI), and a reference group without subjective or assessed cognitive decline. The participants and their relatives answered the self- and proxy-rated versions of the CFI. Results: The Norwegian CFI had power to discriminate between people with dementia and with MCI, SCI, and the reference group. The proxy version had better power than the self-rated version in our participants (area under the curve [AUC] proxy-rated varying from 0.79 to 0.99, AUC self-rated varying from 0.56 to 0.85). Conclusion: The Norwegian CFI was found to be a useful, valid, and robust instrument.

scholarly journals POTENTIAL OF PERSONALITY: HISTORICAL RETROSPECTIVE

Adam alemi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Dina Kazantseva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Deep Foundations ◽  
Historical Aspect ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Quantum Leap ◽  
The Ideal

The essence of personality potential is one of the important characteristics of understanding a person as an integral being, creating an individual space of personal aspirations and values. The origins of the problem under consideration in various forms are present in the philosophical reflections of many researchers and have a long history. Even Socrates, Plotinus, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas drew attention to the deep foundations and spiritual essence of man, to the presence of virtues in a state of potential stagnation, to the need for their development in order to achieve the ideal of perfection. N. Kuzansky, S. L. Frank, P. I. Tillich noted the presence of latent force unfolding in time in living beings, the rejection of the self and introduction into something higher, the correlation of the divine and the human, the interconnection of things and events, etc. The modern world actualizes the solution to the problem, creating conditions for a deeper understanding of the potential, consideration of its integrity and the essential foundations of maximum realization. The crisis in all spheres of human life, economic, political, social, requires a quantum leap in understanding the potential and building, on the basis of modern studies of the phenomenon, new projects for transforming reality. In this regard, understanding the historical aspect of studying the logic of the genesis of potential makes an invaluable contribution to solving this problem. Understanding the depth of philosophical thought in a historical retrospective about the origin, emergence and existence of potential will allow you to connect the past and the present, as well as qualitatively advance into the future.

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