Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary

by Paul Ricoeur, Don Ihde, Erazim V. Kohak

Overview

This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810123984
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	10/16/2007
Series:	Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

PAUL RICOEUR (1913-2005) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. As such his thought is situated within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

ERAZIM V. KOHÁK is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Boston University.

DON IHDE is Distinguished Profssor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.  He is the author of numerous books, including Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context, published by Northwestern University Press.

Table of Contents

Foreword to the New Edition
Translator's Introduction: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur

General Introduction: Question of Method

Part I. Decision: Choice and Its Motives
Chapter 1: Pure Description of "Deciding"
Chapter 2: Motivation and the Corporeal Involuntary
Chapter 3: History of Decision: From Heistation to Choice

Part II. Voluntary Motion and Human Capabilities
Chapter 1: Pure Description of Acting and Moving
Chapter 2: Bodily Spontaneity
Chapter 3: Moving and Effort

Part III. Consenting: Consent and Necessity
Chapter 1: The Problems of Consent
Chapter 2: Experienced Necessity
Chapter 3: The Way of Consent

Conclusion: An Only Human Freedom
Bibliography
Index