Philosophical Anthropology / Edition 1

by Paul Ricoeur

Overview

How do human beings become human? This question lies behind the so-called human sciences. But these disciplines are scattered among many different departments and hold up a cracked mirror to humankind. This is why, in the view of Paul Ricoeur, we need to develop a philosophical anthropology, one that has a much older history but still offers many untapped resources.

This appeal to a specifically philosophical approach to questions regarding what it was to be human did not stop Ricoeur from entering into dialogue with other disciplines and approaches, such as psychoanalysis, history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and the philosophy of language, in order to offer an up-to-date reflection on what he saw as the fundamental issues. For there is clearly not a simple, single answer to the question what is it to be human? Ricoeur therefore takes up the complexity of this question in terms of the tensions he sees between the voluntary and the involuntary, acting and suffering, autonomy and vulnerability, capacity and fragility, and identity and otherness.

The texts brought together in this volume provide an overall view of the development of Ricoeur s philosophical thinking on the question of what it is to be human, from his early 1939 lecture on Attention to his remarks on receiving the Kluge Prize in 2004, a few months before his death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745688541
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	02/16/2016
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	759,495
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paul Ricoeur is (1913-2005) is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago. His many works include Freud and Philosophy, Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another.

Table of Contents

Editors' Preface vii

Note on this Edition xvi

Translators Note xvii

Introduction: The Antinomy of Human Reality and the Problem of a Philosophical Anthropology 1

I Phenomenology of the Will 21

1 Attention: A Phenomenological Study of Attention and Its Philosophical Connections 23

2 The Unity of the Voluntary and the Involuntary as a Limit-Idea 53

3 The Problem of the Will and Philosophical Discourse 72

4 The Phenomenology of the Will and the Approach through Ordinary Language 87

II Semantics of Action 105

5 The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought 107

6 Freedom 124

7 Myth 149

8 The Symbolic Structure of Action 176

9 Human Beings as the Subject of Philosophy 195

III Hermeneutics of the Self 209

10 Individual and Personal Identity 211

11 Narrative Identity 229

12 The Paradoxes of Identity 243

13 Uncanniness Many Times Over 254

14 The Addressee of Religion: The Capable Human Being 269

Epilogue: Personal Capacities and Mutual Recognition 290

Origin of the Texts 296

Index 299