Seminar: Derek Matravers, 9 January 2013

Professor of Philosophy, Derek Matravers
‘Life and Narrative’
9 January 2013

Summary

Many people maintain that some sense of narrative is necessary if we are to make sense of our lives. In his last book, The Mess Inside, Peter Goldie argued that there are certain ‘dangerous fictionalising tendencies’ of narrative that have the potential to distort that sense. I argue two points. First, that some of what Goldie sees as properties of fictional narrative are, in fact, properties of narrative per se. Second, that these are not uniformly dangerous; it depends on what we are trying to achieve with the narrative.

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