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Old 07-11-2010, 01:04 PM   #833
TimMason
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Location: Pontoise, France
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Have you read Strawson's essay on the self? In it, he claims that he does not experience himself as having continuity through time, and that he is not alone in this? (speaking for myself, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't). He argues that people who experience themselves as living continuously do so through constructing stories - and stories are inadequate. (Interestingly, the social historian Charles Tilly makes something like this point in one of his last books, "Why?")

I think that one counter to your saying that it flies in the face of our everyday experience is that this is culturally shaped: there are cultures in which the self doesn't work like this. (At least, I think this is what Marilyn Strathern is getting at in "The Gender of the Gift," where she says that masculine and feminine are not distributed in the same way in New Guinea as they are chez nous. But then I don't know that I'm persuaded that masculine and feminine are distributed chez nous in the same way as they are chez nous. There are more things in heaven and St. Denis than are dreamed of in our philosphies).
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