MacIntyres Narrative Theory of Personal Identity

1
MacIntyres Narrative Theory of Personal Identity

• Personhood as "a character abstracted from a
  history."
• Humans are essentially story-telling animals.
• Our self-concept has no meaning without a story

2
Personal Narrative

• Personal narratives place one in a context
• Context set by traditions and history of ones
  society and family
• Therefore ones personal identity is constrained
  by ones social place.

3
Narrative Theory presupposes Psychological
Continuity

• MacIntyres account presupposes the concept of a
  self in the analytic sense of Locke
• Thus, we have to have both some kind of
  psychological continuity -- a single being that
  has recorded a series of events -- and a
  meaningful way of putting them together, a
  narrative, to have a continuous, identical self.

4
Amy Tan, Two Kinds

• challenges the idea that there is a privileged
  self that the daughter recognizes but that the
  mother tries to change.
• different possibilities for interpreting one life
  force us to ask whether there are not too many
  different stories that constitute the person

5
Thought experiment test

• If we were going to make some sort of thought
  experiment to test the narrative theory of the
  self that is parallel to the mind transplant
  cases, what would it look like?