Your Whole Life - Beyond Childhood and Adulthood (Haney Foundation)
epub | 2.81 MB | English | Author :James Bernard Murphy | 978-0812252231 | 2020 | University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Book Description :

When we talk about human development, we tend to characterize it as proceeding through a series of stages in which we are first children, then adolescents, and finally, adults. But as James Bernard Murphy observes, growth is not limited to the young nor is decline limited to the aged. We are never trapped within the horizon of a particular life stage: children anticipate adulthood and adults recapture childhood. According to Murphy, the very idea of stages of life undermines our ability to see our lives as a whole.
In Your Whole Life, Murphy asks: what accounts for the unity of a human life over time? He advocates for an unconventional, developmental story of human nature based on a nested hierarchy of three powers-first, each person's unique human genome insures biological identity over time; second, each person's powers of imagination and memory insure psychological identity over time; and, third, each person's ability to tell his or her own life story...

Category : | Humanist Philosophy, History & Theory of Politics, Consciousness & Thought Philosophy