num_pages: 288
description:  A holistic view of human development that rejects the conventional stages of childhood adulthood and old ageWhen 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 insures narrative identity over time. Just as imagination and memory rely upon our biological identity so our autobiographical stories rest upon our psychological identity. Narrative is not the foundation of personal identity as many argue but its capstone.Engaging with the work of Aristotle Augustine Jesus and Rousseau as well as with the contributions of contemporary evolutionary biologists and psychologists Murphy challenges the widely shared assumptions in Western thinking about personhood and its development through discrete stages of childhood adulthood and old age. He offers instead a holistic view in which we are always growing and declining always learning and forgetting and always living and dying and finds that only in relation to one's whole life does the passing of time obtain meaning.
language: English
title: Your Whole Life: Beyond Childhood and Adulthood
publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press