A vital factor in modern philosophy is the matter of the self. Is it a few form of actual entity or a really convincing phantasm? Drawing at the paintings of 2 top philosophers, Daniel Dennett and Paul Ricoeur, thinker Joan McCarthy examines how every one of those thinkers casts the self in narrative terms.

McCarthy starts with Dennett’s naturalist objectivist account of the narrative self. in particular, she considers Dennett’s use of the language of laptop programming and his model of the self as one of those downloadable software program package deal, an invaluable theoretical fiction but person who isn't really genuine in any scientifically applicable feel. She poses a few objections to his naturalist method of the matter of human selfhood.

Turning to Ricoeur, she assesses his phenomenological-hermeneutic account of the self as a culturally mediated narrative team spirit. In evaluating Ricoeur’s inspiration of self as an embodied personality (as in a play or novel) woven from the various plots of a unmarried lifestyles to Dennett’s neuroscientific version, McCarthy eventually unearths Ricoeur’s procedure extra accomplished. the foremost good thing about Ricoeur’s interpretation is that it focuses, now not on issues, yet on relationships among notably human actions, resembling constructing long term initiatives or making delivers. She criticizes Dennett’s over the top objectivism as being too slim to account for the richness and many-faceted elements of human life.

Finally she makes hyperlinks with different modern students who're deploying theories of narrative selfhood so as to deal with questions of ethical corporation in a brand new gentle. This new method of moral matters, narrative ethics, is at present the topic of a lot debate in bioethical literature.