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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.
List of contents
I. Phenomenology of the Will 1. Attention: A Phenomenological Study of Attention and its Philosophical Connections
2. The Unity of the Voluntary and the Involuntary as a Limit-Idea
3. The Problem of the Will and Philosophical Discourse
4. The Phenomenology of the Will and the Approach through Ordinary Language
II. Semantics of Action 5. The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought
6. Freedom
7. Myth
8. The Symbolic Structure of Action
9. Human Beings as the Subject of Philosophy
III. Hermeneutics of the Self 10. Individual and Personal Identity
11. Narrative Identity
12. The Paradoxes of Identity
13. Strangeness Many Times Over
14. The Addressee of Religion: The Capable Human Being
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.
Summary
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.
