Identità personale e identità narrativa. Paul Ricoeur critico di Derek Parfit

The main argument of this thesis is the concept of “narrative identity” principally explicated by Paul Ricoeur in his works. The aim is to clarify some further salient aspects of the concept, especially in relation to notions as “narrative” and “personal identity”, that narrative identity relates. In the first chapter, it is offered a brief reconstruction of different views on the relation between narrative and life, trying to explain the way the ricoeurian speculation enters this debate. In the second chapter, it is showed how, using his conceptual distinction between identity as “sameness” and identity as “selfhood”, Ricoeur claims that narrative identity solves the paradoxes of personal identity, mainly illustrated by Derek Parfit’s reductionist proposal. Finally, the third chapter both suggests a confront between literary fiction and Parfit’s Thought experiments, and tries to understand if anti-Narrativist arguments strike down Ricoeur’s narrative model. In conclusion, it is argued that a narrative theory of personal identity can account for the identities of (also) practical entities like us, existing and acting in a spatio-temporal world, in virtue of its anti-reductionist features focused on the subjectivity of experience.