We reconstruct past events, whether in history or in everyday life, in the form of narratives. Yet narratives describing one and the same set of events can and do differ. What is the relation between these different narratives? Must they necessarily conflict? When are they compatible and when not? If we can tell stories differently without getting the facts wrong, what constraints can there be for judging the adequacy of competing narratives?

There are different approaches to the narrative self. I limit myself to one approach that argues narratives have an important role to play in our lives without it being true that a narrative constitutes and creates the self. My own position is broadly sympathetic with that view, but my interest lies with the question of whether there is truth in the claim that to create one’s self-narrative is to create oneself. I argue that a self-narrative may be multiply realised by the inner self—impressions and emotions—and the outer self—roles in work and life. I take an optimistic attitude to the idea that narrative provides a metaphor that may stimulate insight into the nature of self if we accept a plurality of narrative selves. This paper mines a vein of research on narratives for insights into selves without being bewitched into accepting implausible conclusions.

This paper defends the view that narratives that bring understanding of the past need not be exhaustively analyzable as explanatory inferences, nor as causal narratives. Instead of treating historical narrative as explanations, I argue that understanding of history can be analyzed by the general epistemic criteria of understanding. I explore one such criterion, which is of chief importance for good historical narratives: potential inferential power. As a corollary, I dispute one of the distinctive features of narratives described by some philosophers: the non-aggregativity of narrative histories. Instead, I propose that historical narratives modestly aggregate and this aggregation depends on the success of the colligatory concepts they offer.

The paper seeks to argue that different ways in which the self is understood, even if radically distinct from one another, are cases of different narratives. This is done by appealing to conceptual metaphor theory. The paper begins by briefly explaining the difference between the minimal and narrative self and then argues that even radically different ways of understanding the self are cases of different narratives arising out of a metaphorical understanding of abstract concepts.

More than a simple command of a sovereign, law is a form of moral communication, something that helps constitute the way we conceive of ourselves, our community, and our culture. In this essay, I argue that law is a form of “world projection,” a way for human communities to use law as an aesthetic way to understand themselves. Within this legal world are narratives that present an idealized reflection of our world. Law has two functions, a reflective function, in which it mirrors the actual world and a reflexive function, in which it corrects undesirable aspects of the actual world. It is through these functions that law describes the narratives within legal relationships in order to say something real and important about those corresponding relationships in the actual world.

Narratives play an important role in the conceptualizations and classifications of mental disorders and cognitive dysfunctions. They recur in psychiatry, psychology, cognitive sciences, impairments' therapeutics, etc. Despite their relevance, first-person reporting and specialists' recounting of clinical cases have been understated in the literature. This is intriguing since narratives can potentially influence diagnostic statements, procedures, and prescriptions of rehabilitation treatments. They can also account for the extent to which certain disorders are normalized or pathologized within specific cultural contexts. Nonetheless, a narrative/story/description cannot be substituted for the contributions of the brain and behavioral health sciences. In Section I, we summarize three reasons that could explain the deflationary view of narratives in the clinical and neuroscientific literature: a) The brain and behavioral health sciences’ aspiration to emulate successful disciplines centered on pathogen-causal models; b) The bioinspired explanatory patterns; and c) The brain and behavioral health sciences’ neglect of the big picture, i.e., the interaction of components when a cognitive/psychiatric/psychological problem presents. A concomitant core problem is presented in Section II: Psychiatry's out-of-date conception of personality assumes that personality traits are fixed features of a subject’s identity and that identity is a static closed system. In Section III, we challenge this view and urge brain and behavioral health sciences professionals to update their notion of personality and narrative. We conclude by offering some criteria that distinguish genuine narratives from story-like accounts (i.e., genuine narratives must be consistent, explanatory, coherent, and constant).

The role of narratives in clinical practice has long been underappreciated. This disregard is largely due to an overemphasis on reductionist interpretations of disease causes based on the primacy of the medical model of disease. This way of thinking has led to decontextualizing symptoms of disorders from patients’ lives. More recently, however, healthcare professionals have turned towards a biopsychosocial model that reintroduces sociocultural and psychosocial aspects into clinical diagnosis and treatment. To this end, narrative approaches have been increasingly explored as alternative diagnostic and therapeutic tools. Central to the narrative approach is the avoidance of pathologizing language that usually focuses on deficiencies. Instead, patients’ narratives are co-constructed and co-created together with the clinician or therapist to transform them into empowering stories about healing. To make narratives accessible and transformable for the patient, psychoeducational methods can be used to translate scientific and medical knowledge about the disease into stories described in everyday language that resonate with the patient’s own life stories. Consequently, psychoeducational narratives enhance the patient’s competence in coping with a physical or mental illness and re-contextualizing symptoms, and prompt an increased compliance with therapies.

In this paper, I discuss the roles narratives play in the diagnostics, treatment, and recovery of chronic pain patients. I show that the successes of this narrative approach to the treatment of chronic pain support the biopsychosocial model of disease. The central example of narrative interventions discussed in the paper is pain neuroscience education. This is an intervention which aims at helping chronic pain patients reconceptualize their pain experiences so as to align them with neuroscientific knowledge of pain. Multiple clinical trials have established the success of these interventions in pain reduction. This shows that neuroscience pain education is in fact an evidence-based approach. I conclude that narrative and evidence-based medicine are compatible.

When Bradley Lewis announced in 2014 that psychiatry needed to make a "narrative turn", he backed up his appeal as follows: (1) the different explanatory models of mental disorders that are currently competing in psychiatry tell us different stories about mental health; (2) none of these stories has the privilege of being the only true one, and its alternatives the wrong ones; (3) the choice of a model in each case should be made in dialogue with the patient in order to ensure that the model will be chosen that best meets the patient’s goals and desires and, accordingly, would best support the process of recovery. The latter suggestion, however, is not easy to follow when the patients’ subjective goals and desires diverge from the clinical goal of returning the patients to a normal way of life, as is the case with the so-called factitious disorders. The problem is worsened by the theory-ladenness of the interpretations of patients’ first-person narratives. This paper argues against a common assumption that biases our understanding of abnormal behavior, in particular the behavior of those who feign illness. The assumption in question is the following: that such behavior satisfies certain – possibly unknown – psychological needs.

Ontological parsimony requires that if we can dispense with A when best explaining B, or when deducing a nominalistically statable conclusion B from nominalistically statable premises, we must indeed dispense with A. When A is a mathematical theory and it has been established that its conservativeness undermines the platonistic force of mathematical derivations (Field), or that a non numerical formulation of some explanans may be obtained so that the platonistic force of the best numerical-based account of the explanandum is also undermined (Rizza), the parsimony principle has been respected. Since derivations resorting to conservative mathematics and proofs involved in non numerical best explanations also require abstract objects, concepts, and principles under the usual reading of “abstract,” one might complain that such accounts turn out to be as metaphysically loaded as their platonistic counterparts. One might then urge that ontological parsimony is also required of these nominalistic accounts. It might, however, prove more fruitful to leave this particular worry to the side, to free oneself, as it were, from parsimony thus construed and to look at other important aspects of the defeating or undermining strategies that have been lavished on the disposal of platonism. Two aspects are worthy of our attention: epistemic cost and debunking claims. Our knowledge that applied mathematics is conservative is established at a cost, and so is our knowledge that nominalistic proofs play a genuine theoretical role in best explanations. I will suggest that the knowledge one must acquire to show that nominalistic deductions and explanations do indeed play their respective theoretical role involves some question-begging assumptions regarding the nature and validity of proofs. As for debunking, even if the face value content of either non numerical claims, or conservative mathematical claims, or platonistic mathematical claims didn’t figure in our causal explanation of why we hold the mathematical beliefs that we do, construed or understood as beliefs about such contents, or as beliefs held in either of these three ways, we could still be justified in holding them, so that the distinction between nominalistic deductions or non numerical explanations on the one hand and platonistic ones on the other turns out to be spurious with respect to the relevant propositional attitude, i.e., with respect to belief.

The paper presents the classical theory of the subject in the predication judgment, and then the Hegelian doctrine on the subject, with the intention of conducting a comparative analysis. The results of the analysis sustain the viewpoint according to which between the classical subject and the subject of speculative judgment there are some relations that entitle one to consider speculative judgment as a development of classical judgment, for the cases in which the subject is taken as a process.

Evolutionary models for scientific change are generally based on an analogy between scientific changes and biological evolution. Some dissimilarity cases, however, challenge this analogy. An issue discussed in this essay is that despite natural evolution, which is currently considered to be non-globally progressive, science is a phenomenon that we understand as globally progressive. David Hull's solution to this disanalogy is to trace the difference back to their environments, in which processes of natural selection and conceptual selection occur. I will provide two arguments against this solution, showing that Hull's formulation of natural selection prohibits him from removing the environment from the selection process. Then I point to a related tension in his theory, between realism and externalism in science, and give some suggestions to solve these tensions.

In the present article, the author analyses the interpretation of the phenomenon of Christ by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The author uses comparative and hermeneutic methods of historical and philosophical research. Dostoevsky's Christ and Nietzsche's Jesus are interpreted as “conceptual characters” (G. Deleuze), occupying an important place in the philosophical constructions of both thinkers. Stating the epoch-making event of the “death of God” in European culture, they discover the origins of nihilism in Christianity itself and attempt (each in his own way) to recreate the original, pristine Christianity. Reconstruction of the original image of Christ makes it possible to comprehend not only the historical destiny of Christianity and the European portion of humanity, but also the prospects for overcoming the crisis of European and Russian (in the case of Dostoevsky) self-consciousness. It is argued that both interpretations, although far from orthodox Christianity, play the role of a central link in the development of the philosophic thinking of the Russian writer and German philosopher from the critical deposition of European humanism and metaphysics to new projects of human existence in the world. The conceptual images of Dostoevsky's Christ and Nietzsche's Jesus personally embody the spiritual attitudes and models of life that are timeless in nature, and at the same time serve as an expression of the “fundamental metaphysical positions” (M. Heidegger) of existential thinkers. The assertion of the absolute genuineness and beauty of the moral ideal of Christ allows Dostoevsky to return transcendence to the godless world – to substantiate the neo-Christian version of metaphysics, the religious-existential ontology. The “Glad Tidings” of Jesus, his life and death, appear in Nietzsche’s works as a practical elimination of transcendence, the Platonic dualism of the “true” and “visible” worlds. The spiritual attitude of Jesus reveals a direct affinity to Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical “philosophy of becoming”.

The purpose of the article is to present the possibility of integrating basic learning theories into the Extended Intelligent Learning System for data processing, optimization, adaptation and decision making in learning, which is based on the combination of teacher and intelligent tutor with artificial intelligence implemented, which supports the target formation, learning strategy, pedagogy and control. As a framework for the creation of the integrative model of theories, process philosophy is used, which enables a better understanding and explanation of the different paradigms and their functional combination. The article explores the strengths and weaknesses of selected theories and focuses primarily on constructivism, as numerous studies on learning theories have found that a constructive approach to learning is at the heart of many models in both traditional and digital learning in the Era of Big Data. The article explores certain influential learning theories, including the AI methods, their advantages, flaws and fields of intersection with neurosciences in terms of their application in intelligent training systems. The goal of developing the integrative model is to realize the learner's potential in personalized knowledge formation in an intelligent learning environment and to enhance the efficiency of learning.

This paper reveals the importance of learning emotion concepts due to the efficiency of emotional granularity during the categorization of emotions. There are two ways of learning emotion concepts that can contribute to emotional granularity. First, we can learn emotion words. Second, we can learn the implicit content of our emotion concepts, i.e. how emotions feel to us. In order to complete the second task, we need to acquire vivid awareness and vivid memory of the implicit content of our emotion concept. I claim that only after completing the second task can we learn emotion words in a way that is efficient for the categorization of emotions. The problem with that claim is that we do not know how to study the implicit content of our emotions, and how to obtain vivid awareness of it. In this article, I sketch a basic solution to this problem. The article has three parts. In the first part, I outline Lisa Barrett’s Conceptual Act View in order to reveal the functional role of emotion concepts in our brains. In the second part, I explain Anna Wierzbicka’s classical attempt to define emotion concepts. In the third part, I suggest how it is possible to study the fine-grained details of our emotional experience in a scientific way. The goal of developing the integrative model is to realize the learner's potential in personalized knowledge formation in an intelligent learning environment and to enhance the efficiency of learning.