ABSTRACT
The complexities of embodied selfhood make equally complex demands upon a theory of personal identity. These complexities have largely been neglected by mainstream theorists of personal identity, who have been concerned with a metaphysical conception of ‘person’ as a purely psychological entity. In this chapter I take Marya Schechtman’s critique of the standard psychological continuity theories of personal identity as my starting point, to show how the narrative model provides a framework for understanding persons as beings whose existence is primarily practical. Narrative identity is not simply a fi rst-person report but a complex structure that interweaves fi rst-, second-, and third-person perspectives into a semantic and temporal unity with a subject who attests to that identity and in doing so constitutes it as her own; one whose claims concerning identity are subject to certain constraints and can be tested by processes of validation.
