As Arsenic

Macintyre, J. E.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4615-6847-6_3

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…66 Literature abounds in examples of characters, such as Sartre's Roquentin and Musil's Ulrich, who display an exceptional capacity for self-reflection without experiencing their lives in narrative terms. The emphasis on the link between self-narration and the capacity for ethically responsible self-reflection also risks ignoring the fact that narrative and human existence it is fully possible to experience one's life as a coherent narrative and to interpret particular experiences within the framework of this narrative without engaging in any reflection on its nature and justification.…”

Section: The Ethics Of Narrativity and Antinarrativitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics

Meretoja¹

2014

nlh

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Theorists of narrative have been divided into those who conceive of narrative primarily as a cognitive instrument for imposing meaningful order onto the real and those who consider it to be primarily an ontological category that characterizes the human way of being in the world, that is, something constitutive of human existence. These can be called respectively the epistemological and ontological position on the significance of narrative for human existence. Galen Strawson, in turn, has made an influential distinction between descriptive and normative positions on the narrativity of experience. In this essay, I suggest that even though these conceptual differentiations are helpful to a certain extent, such binary terms may also prevent us from paying adequate attention to complex interconnections between the ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimension of the relation between narrative and human existence. I argue that the question of the significance of narrative for human existence can be formulated with an emphasis on any of these philosophical dimensions but that the answers involve implicit assumptions concerning all three dimensions. In the debate on narrative and human existence, particularly undertheorized has been the role of tacit ontological assumptions concerning what is counted as real. In disentangling the debate, I argue that both experience and narrative are phenomena constituted by interpretative activity; while it is important not to conflate experience and narrative, it can be meaningfully said that narrative interpretations of experiences have a constitutive role in our existence. By looking at how certain novelists have dealt with this problematic, the essay also suggests how to tie the theoretical study of narrative more intimately to the study of the philosophical underpinnings of narrative forms in literary history.

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Section: The Ethics Of Narrativity and Antinarrativitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics

Meretoja¹

2014

nlh

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“…An educated public, on the other hand, refers to "a common body of texts, texts which are accorded canonical status within that particular community" [7]. Its other essential ingredients are: (a) the existence of "a tolerably large body of individuals, educated into both the habit and the opportunity of active rational debate, to whose verdict appeal is being made by the intellectual protagonists" who "in their communication with one another [they] must recognize themselves as constituting a public" [8]; and (b) "shared assent, both to the standards by appeal to which the success or failure of any particular thesis or argument is to be judged, and to the form of rational justification from which those standards derive their authority" [9].…”

Section: Macintyre's Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Competing Conceptions of the Educated Public

Wain¹

1994

J Philosophy of Education

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Alasdair Maclntyre's paper 'The idea of an educated public' followed on his frontal attack in After Virtue on the 'failed' intellectual project of the Enlightenment and on its liberal heritage. His argument, in the paper, was that the only way we can save ourselves from that ,failure is by restoring the idea of an educated public modelled on the type found in eighteenth century Scotland. This article takes up the issue of the 'crisis' of modernity, and argues that Maclntyre's 'public' is just one possible one and not necessarily the best. Other, competing conceptions of an educated public have been proposed, among others by Dewey and Habermas, that do not necessitate the conservative solution of going back to the past.

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As Arsenic

Cited by 2 publications

References 196 publications

Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics

Narrative and Human Existence: Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics

Competing Conceptions of the Educated Public

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