Recently, the idea of focusing on practical rather than metaphysical identity has received considerable attention and this parallels increased interest in narrative accounts of agency that aim to account for the holistic character of human life and experience.  In this collection, Atkins and Mackenzie gather these disparate strands to focus on the interrelations between narrative self-understanding and the active self-constitution of agency, identity, and the structure of the practical self.     Important influences for these ideas — reflected in multiple references in the present collection — include Christine Korsgaard, J. David Velleman, and Marya Schechtman, and to a lesser degree the accounts of narrative agency from Peter Goldie and the late Paul Ricoeur.

Mackenzie’s introduction is a model of clarity, conciseness, and breadth.  She quickly presents an overview of debates between psychological and bodily (animalist) accounts of personal identity before shifting focus to illustrate how emphasizing practical rather than metaphysical issues offers new resources to these discussions and reveals the importance of these questions in the first place.  This frames the collection as a whole, which shifts the focus from metaphysical questions about identity to practical and evaluative concerns.  Mackenzie also provides a succinct account of Korsgaard’s conception of practical identity, its relation to recent work on narrative agency, and a provisional defense of narrative agency to Galen Strawson’s recent criticisms.

Besides Mackenzie’s introduction, the collection is composed of four parts.  Part I, “Personal Identity and Continuity” focuses on the relationship between practical and metaphysical accounts of personal identity, effectively offering an introduction to traditional accounts of personal identity before motivating the shift for the rest of the collection’s focus on practical aspects of identity.  Here, Caroline West’s essay is especially worth mentioning since she not only rejects Eric Olson’s thesis that practical concerns are irrelevant to metaphysical issues of personal identity, but she also reverses his position to argue that our criteria for identity are constituted by our person-directed attitudes and practices.  Although not discussed here, this bears some resemblance to Peter Strawson’s reactive attitude account of moral responsibility.  Thus, West argues that not only can we not keep metaphysical and practical accounts of identity separate, the latter informs the former. 

Kim Atkins’ essay on the phenomenological tradition’s emphasis on the interaction between first-personal perspective of agency and our embodiment likewise attempts to overcome philosophical dichotomies, this time between third-personal ‘bodily’ accounts of identity and first-personal ‘psychological’ accounts.  In addition, Atkins’ piece highlights another feature of this collection, the willingness to include perspectives outside the resources of traditional analytic philosophy, reflected in a later essay by Genevieve Lloyd, and David Velleman’s appeal to insights from the Daoist tradition.

          Part II, “Practical identity and Practical Deliberation”, includes essays by Jan Bransen, Mackenzie, and Christman.  These three chapters focus on the importance of the past and future temporally-extended self, which is essential for practical deliberation.  Bransen’s essay picks out the normative importance that choice has in the determination of the self or character of the agent, an argument that relies heavily on aspects of his earlier work and Velleman’s account of the self.  Though he spends considerable time explaining these aspects, both Velleman’s and his own views are complex and those unfamiliar with either work might find the essay less accessible than many of the other pieces in the collection.  Fortunately, Mackenzie’s essay also focuses on aspects of Bransen’s previous work, and here, like in her introduction, she admirably and concisely explains these insights as a starting point for her analysis of the way projective imagination — and thus possible future aspects of our self — informs our current narrative identities and our appropriation of the past. 

One puzzling feature of part II is the lack of attention paid to Michael Bratman’s work, which is surprising since his own neo-Lockean account of personal identity relies so heavily on the inter-temporal connections and continuities that forward- and backward-looking plans and policies provide to aid in practical reasoning and motivated agency.

          Part III, “Selfhood and Normative Agency” is perhaps the most consistent and intriguing section. Christman’s essay in Part II, which focuses on the impact of amnesia on practical reasoning as well as autonomy and even agency, offers a suitable introduction to this section’s concerns.  Although less unified in the directions they pursue, all four essays in Part III have a common starting point in the practical contours of human agency, and each essay deserves considerable attention in its own right. 

Velleman offers a novel re-reading of Harry Frankfurt’s important work on identification before turning to a less conventional source, the Zuangzhu, as a resource for addressing a problem that reflexive self-awareness creates by distancing our ‘thinking’ selves from our ‘active’ selves.  Calhoun also focuses on ways we can become distanced from ourselves, but her analysis aims not at explaining why we become distanced from ourselves but rather serves as a critique of many of the standard models of agency which fail to explain psychological distancing from our interests experienced in moments of depression, demoralization, and alienation. 

Jeanette Kennett and Steve Mathews offer one of the most accessible pieces in the collection and focus on the way empirical literature on Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and psychopathology highlight how normative competence, including moral normativity, is an essential element to unified agency.  The final essay by Christopher Cordner picks up the discussion of moral normativity but argues that our moral normativity is grounded in a prior affective bond of common-humanity experienced in feelings of remorse when that normative bond is broken or severed.

          Part IV, “Selfhood, Narrative, and Time” offers somewhat of an epilogue to the collection.  Unlike the rest of the volume, which focuses on the need to incorporate practical and temporal features into our accounts of agency and identity, these two essays, by Genevieve Lloyd and Karen Jones, focus on aspects of temporality and the way they are essential elements of important properties or capacities in human agency.  Thus, Lloyd’s discussion of the temporal nature of freedom and necessity and Jones’ position that love is a temporally extended, “trajectory-dependent property” offer further support for the importance of an account of human agency and identity that can effectively capture these temporally extended features.  While at first glance these themes appear distinct from the collection’s main focus, these articles are best understood as offering support for overall importance of narrative accounts that recognize the practical and first-personal elements of agency, but via a different route.

          Overall, the collection offers both an accessible introduction, sustained defense, and some of the latest detailed work on narrative and practical accounts of agency and identity.  This includes pieces that situate the Continental and Analytic traditions in dialogue with one another, and with new empirical research into various aspects of agency.  Certain essays and sections cohere more tightly together than others and the order of certain essays might have been more fruitfully arranged.  In particular, placing Mackenzie’s essay before Bransen’s might have made the latter more accessible.  Nevertheless, on the whole, these essays offer a sustained defense and justification for future research into both practical identity and narrative agency.  Though I sometimes question whether the account of narrative agency employed remains consistent throughout the collection or whether each account can overcome the criticisms of narrativity raised by Strawson and others, this book illustrates how narrative conceptions of agency — whether unified or different narrative accounts — explain many core aspects of human agency and open up new themes for future study.

© 2011 Scott O’Leary

Scott O’Leary, Fordham University