Erzählen, Denken, Handeln. Die epistemische Valens von Narrativen aus der Perspektive einer neoaristotelischen Erzähltheorie
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Abstract: Narrating, Thinking, Acting. The Epistemic Valence of Narratives from the Perspective of a Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Narrative
Research proposals, historical narratives, reportages, police re-ports, cosmogonies, evolutionary theories and biographies are all narrative. All these linguistic practices are linked to certain hu-man interests. But what do these narratives tell us? Is knowledge that is conveyed through narration different from knowledge that is not conveyed through narration? And do we even have to tell stories to communicate certain knowledge to someone?
In the philosophy of narrative, there is no consensus either re-garding the logical form of narrative knowledge or regarding the underlying concept of narrative. The debate about the form and content of narrative knowledge mainly revolves around the questions of how reliable knowledge conveyed through narra-tives is, whether specific content exists that can only be con-veyed narratively and whether the relationship between the narrator and the narrative differs from that of a speaking person to a non-narrative expression. This thesis sees itself as a contribu-tion to these current research questions and, in the first part, makes a proposal for answering these questions against the back-ground of an own developed definition of “narrative” and “narra-tion”. The starting point is a definition of “narrative” much dis-cussed in classical narratology and analytical philosophy, accord-ing to which narratives consist of causally and temporally inter-connected semantic units or “events”. In addition, research pos-tulates a so-called “subjective perspective” or a special kind of emotional involvement in order to provide reason for the obser-vation that narratives are about beings who have desires, inten-tions and set purposes for themselves.
However, this definition raises numerous follow-up questions. Firstly, regarding the logical form of coherence in narratives - referred to below as narrative coherence - it is unclear how nar-ratives differ from descriptions of technical processes, for exam-ple in instruction manuals or the descriptions in medical books. If narrative coherence is defined exclusively as a causal conjunc-tion, this difference is ignored. On the other hand, there is no uniform and precise explication of the object of narratives - called narrative reference in this work. The terms “subjective”, “intentional” or “emotional” either prove to be open for criti-cism by example narratives or lead to terminological and epis-temological problems.
My suggestion in the main part of the thesis is based on this the-oretical diagnosis. In doing so, I assume that the problems of narrative reference formulated above are intertwined with those of narrative coherence. Following an Aristotelian approach that extends from Hannah Arendt via Arthur C. Danto and J. David Vellemann to numerous contemporary contributions to the de-bate - such as those by Gregory Currie or Noël Carroll - I argue for the assumption that narrative coherence does not come about through a causal connection of semantic units, but through the kind of logic with which we use in practical contexts. Narratives have a special form of coherence because they are necessarily about human actions.
The practical context in question connects reasons with actions or actions and subsequent actions with one another. In contrast to the forms of narrative coherence discussed so far, practical contexts have a precisely definable moment of contingency. In Part II, I specify this kind of coherence with the help of a neo-Aristotelian concept of action, for which the work of Michael Thompson and Douglas Lavin is representative. In doing so, I show that with the help of this concept of action, the relation-ship between descriptions of action and narratives, which has only been discussed in the periphery of analytical debates, can be made accessible to a fundamental analysis. In addition, with a view to possible follow-up research, the position that narrative inferences could take within the framework of a contemporary philosophical anthropology is discussed.
Finally, at the end of the main section, I show that Aristotelian-inspired thinking about narratives stands in the hidden tradition of a whole series of modern philosophical classics of the 20th century. In reconstructing two of these philosophical classics - Hannah Arendt and Alasdair Macintyre - I trace variants of the anthropological and action-theoretical assumptions that under-pin my work and thus deepen the understanding of the neo-Aristotelian narrative theory presented in this thesis.
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Created: 2022Issued: 2024-10-30Updated: 2024-10-30
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Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften und Philosophie
Publisher
Philipps-Universität Marburg
Language
ger
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DoctoralThesis
DFG-subjects
Analytische PhilosophieAristotelismusAristotelesArthur C. DantoEpistemologieAlasdair McIntyre Analytische HandlungstheorieErzählen
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100
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Dreyer, Malte (0000-0001-5971-3572): Erzählen, Denken, Handeln. Die epistemische Valens von Narrativen aus der Perspektive einer neoaristotelischen Erzähltheorie. : Philipps-Universität Marburg 2024-10-30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17192/z2024.0473.