Abstract

The paper provides an account of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practical identity in the light of those contemporary approaches to personal identity which, within a naturalistic understanding of the mental, combine narrative and realist explanations of the self. I will argue that Bourdieu’s concept of habitus offers a subpersonal level of cognitive and practical unification of the agent and that histories of life are attempts, prone to a variety of distortions, to achieve an interpretive reappropriation of the products of the habitus in the form of a narrative totality. Lastly, I will maintain that both habitus and history of life have a defensive fundament