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Some habits are vital to who we are in that they shape both our self-perception and how we are seen by others. This is so, I argue, because there is a constitutive link between what I shall call 'identity-shaping habits' and narrative agency. Identity-shaping habits are paradigmatically acquired and performed by persons. The ontology of personhood involves both synchronic and diachronic dimensions which are structurally analogous to the synchronic acquisition and the diachronic performance of habits, and makes persons distinctly suitable to being shaped by habits. Since habits differ vastly in their scope, I develop a conceptualization that carves out defining features of identity-shaping habits. Such habits, I venture, fundamentally alter a person's embodiment such that the alterations to their psychological and physiological make-up vitally inform their persistence—if not metaphysically (as in constituting necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of personal identity over time), then at least practically by crucially shaping one's narrative agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines in a comparative manner how remembering and forgetting contribute to self-constitution in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman and William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee. In The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett embarks upon a journey from the North to the South in quest of identity. Lanterns on the Levee features a similar identity quest pursued, this time, by an autobiographer who records the very process of this quest rather than representing it by a fictional character. Percy the stoic restores realness to people in a lost world, from whom he derives his self and in whom his self is deeply rooted, by remembering the personally significant and good past and forgetting the personally insignificant and evil present. In so doing, he not only asserts his personal identity but continues to construct it in an imaginative way. Will, by contrast, seeks to constitute and ascertain his stoic identity both by attempting to forget the everydayness of ordinary life and thereby establish a genuine relationship with people and by undertaking the pursuit of a fatherly figure who echoes his tenacious memory of his father. Both Will and Percy, however, may be called what Kierkegaard calls a knight of infinite resignation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Fischer has recently argued that the value of acting freely is the value of self-expression. Drawing on David Velleman's earlier work, Fischer holds that the value of a life is a narrative value and free will is valuable insofar as it allows us to shape the narrative structure of our lives. This account rests on Fischer's distinction between regulative control and guidance control. While we lack the former kind of control, on Fischer's view, the latter is all that is needed for self-expression. I first develop Fischer's narrative account, focusing on his reliance on temporal loops as giving us control over the value of our lives. Second, I argue that the narrative account grants us greater power over the past than Fischer would allow: since narrative allows not only for changes in how we feel about episodes in our past but what those episodes in fact were, it allows for a kind of retroactive self-constitution. Finally, I suggest that this modification of the narrative view opens the possibility of a conception of freedom far stronger than guidance control. It does not give us the libertarian control over whether to choose A or B in the present, but it does provide a measure of control over the sort of person an agent has been, and thus whether she is the sort of person who will choose A or B in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We drew on Foucault's notion of ‘practices of the self’ to examine how young people take up, negotiate, and resist the imperatives of a public health discourse concerned with the relationships between health, fitness, and the body. We did this through a discussion of the ways young women and men talk about their own and others' bodies, in the context of a number of in-depth interviews conducted for the Life Activity Project, a study of the place and meaning of physical activity in young people's lives, funded by an Australian Research Council Grant. We found that the young women and men in the study engaged the health/fitness discourse very differently: for the young men, health conflated with fitness as an embodied capacity to do physical work; and for the young women, health was a much more difficult and complex project associated with managing and monitoring practices associated with eating and exercise to maintain an ‘appropriate’ body shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]