In this interview, Kalle Pihlainen discusses the challenges which academic historical writing meets from other ways of using history. The proliferation of these contexts seems to offer numerous new opportunities, but they need to be responded to with advance theoretical reflec-tion. It is important to not fall under the illusion of direct access to reality (historical reality included). Hence, mastery of the constructivist perspective is still needed for doing reliable historical research and theoretical reflection on history. Representation still proves to be one of the most important questions. Pihlainen stands firmly for the narrativist philosophy of history, although one of his main concerns are materiality and embodiment.

For P.F. Strawson self is an embodied agent. The aim of my paper is to discuss those fragments of Strawson’s philosophical work which directly refer to the concept of self. I try to show that Strawson’s view on the nature of self and self-reference is distinct and different from L. Wittgenstein’s nihilism and from the modest nihilism advocated by G.E.M. Anscombe.