The Narrative Shape of Agency: Three Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives

Abstract

This essay examines three contemporary approaches to narrative: Galen Strawson’s skeptical attack on narrativity and the responses to it in the work of David Velleman and the late Peter Goldie with an eye to the connection between narrative and agency. It argues for the reverse of Gregory Currie’s recent claim that “narrative is the product of agency”: if we examine agency instead as the product of narrative, it’s possible to trace through the use of narrative examples a critique of many assumptions in what Velleman calls the “standard account of agency.