I began this project in preparation for the Shearman Lectures, which I was invited to deliver at University College, London, in May 2007. Those three lectures – revised, expanded, and subdivided – appear here as Lectures 1, 2, 3, and 5. I am grateful to the Philosophy Department of UCL and especially its chair, Jo Wolff, for the honor of giving the Shearman Lectures and for three days of wonderful discussion and hospitality in London.

Having written three lectures, I found myself with more to say and an inclination to say it in the same voice, as if presenting additional lectures. In reality, Lectures 4, 6, and 7 have never been presented. Casting myself in a role even larger than that of Shearman lecturer is presumptuous indeed; I hope that it will prove to have benefited the reader, by encouraging me to express myself more briefly and informally than usual.

Beyond their overt topic, these lectures pursue a private agenda of mine, which is to locate the intersection of various themes that I have hitherto pursued independently, with only the vague hope that they would some day intersect. One theme is an analysis of practical reasoning as a process of making sense of oneself in causal-psychological terms. Another theme is an analysis of narrative as conveying a mode of understanding – and, specifically, self-understanding – that is distinct from the understanding conveyed by causal explanation.