Pregnancy, a human phenomenon experienced throughout the world and throughout history, has been largely ignored by the philosophical community. A preference for the abnormal and the extraordinary has left this common yet challenging process on the sidelines of philosophical discussion. Pregnancy stands as a significant challenge to many of our intuitions about the self, particularly those concerning the boundaries, plurality and diachronic identity of the self. Because of this, pregnancy necessitates a theory of the self which does not merely uphold our usual assumptions about the self. Daniel Dennett presents a theory of the self which meets this criterion. He argues that the self is a centre of narrative gravity: an abstract, theoretical entity which is useful for the explanation and prediction of an individual’s behaviour. Dennett’s theory, though provocative, lacks a basis in typical human experience. He relies primarily on thought experiments and extraordinary conditions to support his theory. To demonstrate the applicability and generality of this theory, it must be tested against a common, natural human occurrence like pregnancy. In this paper we explore the application of Daniel Dennett’s theory of the narrative self to the experience of pregnancy. This application yields a double result. Dennett’s theory is bolstered by a demonstration of its generality and applicability, and the experience of pregnancy is placed into a context in which it can be validated and understood.

Pregnancy, a human phenomenon experienced throughout the world and throughout history, has been largely ignored by the philosophical community. A preference for the abnormal and the extraordinary has left this common yet challenging process on the sidelines of philosophical discussion. Pregnancy stands as a significant challenge to many of our intuitions about the self, particularly those concerning the boundaries, plurality and diachronic identity of the self. Because of this, pregnancy necessitates a theory of the self which does not merely uphold our usual assumptions about the self. Daniel Dennett presents a theory of the self which meets this criterion. He argues that the self is a centre of narrative gravity: an abstract, theoretical entity which is useful for the explanation and prediction of an individual’s behaviour. Dennett’s theory, though provocative, lacks a basis in typical human experience. He relies primarily on thought experiments and extraordinary conditions to support his theory. To demonstrate the applicability and generality of this theory, it must be tested against a common, natural human occurrence like pregnancy. In this paper we explore the application of Daniel Dennett’s theory of the narrative self to the experience of pregnancy. This application yields a double result. Dennett’s theory is bolstered by a demonstration of its generality and applicability, and the experience of pregnancy is placed into a context in which it can be validated and understood.

Eliminative materialism is a view that has been sparsely acknowledged and often overlooked when it comes to providing us with a criterion of what it takes for you and me to persist over time. This owes much to its counterintuitive belief in the non-existence of folk-psychological notions, such as persons. Against a backdrop of philosophical and scientific inquiry, this paper amounts to providing such a criterion in the form of f-organisms, taking a different route based on emergent descriptions, instead of conventional reductive explanations. The temporal plasticity (change over time) of such f-organisms display stable persistence conditions despite their constant state of reconstruction. What informs the question of identity in such a paradigm is dealt with accordingly, and the notion of the self is put in a context in which it can no longer be said to be the self we are familiar with – a context in which the center fails to hold. The imperative question for any of such criteria will be to accommodate the concept of identity as unconstrained and far away from uncertainty as possible. The main theme will thus be to reassess the general notion of diachronic identity to include our identity over time, and make explicit the various implications for such a view.