Irish Philosophical Society `Work in Progress Seminar Series,

This is a draft of a part of a chapter for a book tentatively titled The Fidelity of Reason: a Phenomenology of Self, Nature and Divinity. The previous chapter has discussed the notion of the self and concluded 1) that the phenomenological notion of a `thin self as first personal perspective (Zahavi, 2005) is inescapableand 2) that this self is not a substance or thing (Strawson 2009). The previous section of this chapter shows that a fuller account of the self requires a narrative sense of the self as one which is teleologically directed toward personhood and which can give an account of itself in temporal terms, i.e. with respect to its past and future. This does not mean that there are a multiple of selves in this one entity, but rather that the self is layered and that these layers are developmentally formed, i.e. we grow into being the selves we become.