Abstract

This paper sketches, and partially defends, a metaphysics of human persons and “the self” that will help make sense of and lend support to a narrative conception of the self. Narrative, or the activity of constructing narratives, has been credited with all manner of different roles in our lives, from contributing to positive outcomes in the wake of trauma, to helping us make sense of and find meaning in our own actions and other events that make up our lives, to unifying our consciousness and explaining important aspects of our agency, to constituting us as persons.  Important figures in multiple academic disciplines maintain that in some sense “the self” is, or is constituted by, narrative. Despite their popularity over the past couple of decades, such claims remain as metaphysically mysterious as they are theoretically rich and provocative.  This paper sketches a novel theory about the relationship between persons and their “selves” that makes metaphysical sense of claims like “the self is narratively constituted” without implying (as many narrative-self theories do) that persons are either fictional entities or narratively-structured events.