ABSTRACT
James Phelan liked the author characterization of narrative identity enough to quote it twice in an article. Contrary to Galen Strawson’s claim, narrative is a resource available to anyone, regardless of belief in continuous or discontinuous identity. Strawson’s categories for modes of temporal experience simply don’t connect coherently and predictably with a narrative outlook on experience. Strawson prefaces his position on discontinuous identity by distinguishing “between one’s experience of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as a human being taken as a whole, and one’s experience of oneself when one is considering oneself principally as an inner mental entity or ‘self’ of some sort”. Some recognition of this sort seems to have dawned on James Phelan, who describes himself as “an Episodic who is a recovering Diachronic.” “This damn story and that damn story and that other damn story,” he reports of his own experience.
