Allen Speight 
Narrative, Philosophy and Life 

This notable collection provides an interdisciplinary platform for prominent thinkers who have all made significant recent contributions to exploring the nexus of philosophy and narrative. It includes the latest assessments of several key positions in the current philosophical debate. These perspectives underpin a range of thematic strands exploring the influence of narrative on notions of selfhood, identity, temporal experience, and the emotions, among others. Drawing from the humanities, literature, history and religious studies, as well as philosophy, the volume opens with papers on narrative intelligence and the relationship between narrative and agency. It features special sections of in-depth commentary on a range of topics. How, for example, do narrative and philosophical biography interact? Do celebrated biographical and autobiographical accounts of the lives of philosophers contribute to our understanding of their work? This new volume has a substantive remit that incorporatesthe intercultural religious view of philosophy’s links to narrative together with its many secular aspects. A valuable new resource for more advanced scholars in all its constituent disciplines, it represents a significant addition to the literature of this richly productive area of research.

Table of Content

Introduction.- I. Narrative, Philosophy and Life.- Aristotle on Narrative Intelligence” Silvia Carli.- Philosophy, Agency and Narratology, A. Speight.- The Whole Story: Personal Identity, Narrative, and Biology, M. Schechtman.- Dostoevsky And The Literature Of Process: What Open Time Looks Like, G.S. Morson.- Narrative Thinking And Sorting Out The Mess Inside, P. Goldie.- We Live Beyond Any Tale That We Happen To Enact, G. Strawson.- Narrative Form And The ‘Meaning’ Of A Life, J. Landy.- Philosophical Insight, Emotion And Popular Fiction, N. Carroll.- II. Philosophy, Narrative and Life Writing: Philosophical Biography and Biographical Philosophy.- Reading Descartes’ Life and Writings, D. Clarke.- Writing the Lives of the Philosophers: Reflections on Spinoza (and Others), S. Nadler .- Hume’s Own History, A. Garrett.- Romantic Interest, Contexts, and Narratives: Writing a Biography of Margaret Fuller, C. Capper.- A Hard Case: Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Biography, A. La Vopa.- The (Ir)relevance of Biography, M. Kuehn.- Philosophical Life Portraits, A. Rorty.- III. Narrative and Philosophy across Cultures. – The Discontinuity of Human Action: Narrative and Interpretation in Early China, M. Puett.- ‘And we shall compose a poem to establish these truths: The Power of Narrative Art in South Asian Literary Cultures, A. Monius.- The Empty Circle: Aspects of Narrative in Mahayana Buddhist Thought, M.D. Eckel.​

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