CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Kajtár, László |
|---|---|
| Title | The Narrativity Condition as a Necessary Condition of Personal Identity |
| Summary | The thesis enters the contemporary philosophical debate about personal identity. Based on the traditionally neglected phenomenology of self-experience, I argue for a specific necessary condition of diachronic identity. I believe that there are three intricately entangled concepts that can provide a starting point. I discuss consciousness, self-interpretation, narrative and their interconnections, taking into account other disciplines of the social sciences (such as narrative psychology) that help phenomenology in making sense of self-experience. The condition I suggest is “the narrativity condition”: if there is personal identity through time, then there is a semi-conscious self-interpretation in the form of a narrative. I argue that this narrative self-interpretation is informative regarding synchronic identity (the individuation or characterization of persons), and that it is also a necessary condition of personhood. Instead of relying on metaphysical answers to the question: “what are persons?”, I approach the issue from the other way around: the actual self-experiences and practices of people through which they acquire and keep their identities shed light on the nature and criteria of personhood. |
| Supervisor | Weberman, David |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/kajtar_laszlo.pdf |
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