Why Narrative Matters: Philosophy, Method, Theory

In providing the author's own account of why narrative matters, he want to speak to the necessity of narrative -- more specifically, narrative hermeneutics -- in understanding the human realm. This necessity, he suggest, is threefold: philosophical, methodological, and theoretical. In speaking of the philosophical necessity of narrative, he will address the idea of alterity, focusing on the alienation or otherness of the experiencing subject and the consequent recourse to narrative hermeneutics. Note that, for each of these three movements, he have referred to the idea of otherness. He is doing this partly because the idea of the Other has come to be very important in the work he have recently been doing. But he is also doing it because it has helped him think in a different way about the centrality of narrative hermeneutics in exploring the human realm. With that, people can turn to addressing the question of narrative's necessity on the philosophical plane.