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/ David Car interviewed by Filip Gołaszewski /
David Carr is among the philosophers who have done most to make phenomenology’s contribution to the study of narrative both explicit and systematic. His engagement with the philosophy of history began with his work on the translation of Husserl’s Crisis, which confronted him directly with the problem of the relationship between phenomenology and history. His earliest direct contribution to the topic, the 1986 article “Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity,” was followed by what many regard as his major statement on the subject: Time, Narrative and History (1991). In that book, Carr presented the conjoined nature of narratives, everyday life, and the temporality of subjective experience and action, engaging with the narratological tradition and with poststructuralism and hermeneutics while arguing for the distinctive necessity of a phenomenological perspective. The work also expanded Paul Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity to include plural subjects – nations, communities, groups – a move with evident Hegelian resonances that would prove central to Carr’s later thinking.
The Paradox of Subjectivity (1999) represented what Carr himself describes as a kind of detour. Concerned with the concept of the subject in the transcendental tradition – primarily Kant and Husserl – and with its critics in Heidegger and the structuralists, the book sought to defend the methodological rather than metaphysical character of transcendental subjectivity. Two years later, the article “Place and Time: On the Interplay of Historical Points of View” (2001) announced a return to the problem of history, examining how subjectively embedded experience – the point of view of the agent – shapes historical experience through narrative structure. The culmination of this trajectory came with Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World (2014), in which Carr focused on the history understood as a basis for narrative understanding.
How to cite:
Carr, David. “The Temporality of the Life-Story: A Conversation on Phenomenology and Narrative.” Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 10, no. 1 (2026): 216-221. https://doi.org/10.14394/eidos.jpc.2026.0010.
Author
David Carr
Professor Emeritus, Emory University
201 Dowman Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7570-4633
dcarr@emory.edu
Filip Gołaszewski (Interviewer)
Independent Scholar, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6698-0177
philipgolaszewski@gmail.com
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