About this event

The Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law is delighted to host Professor Marya Schechtman for the first workshop in the 2025/26 KJuris programme.

Title

Do It for the Plot: Making Sense of the Narrative Self

Abstract

The idea that the self is narrative in form has been expressed in multiple academic disciplines and throughout popular culture. It has also been widely disparaged. Supporters argue that having a self-narrative is necessary for agency, autonomy, and full-blown personhood. Detractors argue that narrative self-conceptions are epistemically suspect and morally harmful. Unsurprisingly, there is some truth on both sides. Narrative approaches to the self take many forms, and arguments about the viability of such approaches often talk past one another. In this talk I argue that the standard objections to narrative conceptions of self assume a particularly weak version of the view. Using insights from cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology I outline an alternative version according to which we constitute ourselves by developing a self-narrative within socio-cultural constraints. While this alternative avoids most of the specific criticisms raised against narrative views, it also reveals an issue of genuine concern. To avoid the epistemic worries about self-narrative, this account gives socio-cultural norms and schemas a central role in constraining the narratives that make us who we are. This makes us vulnerable to oppression and other moral harms. I see this not as a defect of the view, however, but as an accurate description of the situation social beings like us find themselves in. The solution, I argue, is not to reject narrative approaches to the self, but to address objectionably constraining social structures directly, something we are able to do precisely because we are self-narrators.

Author Bio

Marya Schechtman, LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UIC, studies personal identity, practical reasoning, and bioethics. Author of The Constitution of Selves and Staying Alive, she develops narrative and anthropological accounts of identity bridging psychological and biological views. She lectures internationally and has published widely on autonomy and identity.

About KJuris

Directed by Professor Massimo Renzo and Doctor Todd Karhu, King's Legal Philosophy Workshop Series, KJuris, is a forum devoted to discussing works in progress by today's leading legal philosophers and theorists as well as by promising younger talents from around the world. While our focus is philosophical and jurisprudential, we construe these terms broadly and welcome all rigorous methodological approaches to legal theory.