Oneself as Another

Paul Ricoeur

University of Chicago Press, 1994 - Philosophy - 363 pages

Paul Ricoeur has been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of the century. Oneself as Another, the clearest account of his "philosophical ethics," substantiates this position and lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of morals.

Focusing on the concept of personal identity, Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of the self that charts its epistemological path and ontological status.

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Oneself as another

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The central theme here is the concept of personal identity, within which Ricoeur examines three major issues: the idea of self, of identity or sameness, and of relation to that which is not self. His ...

Contents

• The Question of Selfhood: 1
• Person and Identifying Reference A Semantic Approach: 27
• Utterance and the Speaking Subject A Pragmatic Approach: 40
• An Agentless Semantics of Action: 56
• From Action to the Agent: 88
• Personal Identity and Narrative Identity: 113
• The Self and Narrative Identity: 140
• The Self and the Ethical Aim: 169
• The Self and the Moral Norm: 203
• The Self and Practical Wisdom Conviction: 240
• What Ontology in View?: 297
• INDEX: 357

About the author

Professor of philosophy at the University of Paris and the University of Chicago, Paul Ricoeur has been described as "possibly the only younger philosopher in Europe whose reputation is of the magnitude of that of the old men of Existentialism---Marcel, Jaspers, Heidegger and Sartre . . . ." His work has been characterized as "the most massive accomplishment of any philosopher of Christian faith since the appearance of Gabriel Marcel." A practitioner of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl mediated by a return to Immanuel Kant---in that things in themselves, though unknowable, are not excluded by bracketing existence but are acknowledged as the necessary conditions for the possibility of human experience---Ricoeur has examined those parts of experience---faulty, fallible, and susceptible to error and evil---that other phenomenologists, interested primarily in the cognitional, have neglected. In this respect he follows in the footsteps of Heidegger and Sartre, but he goes beyond them in his discovery of principles transcending human subjectivity that are amenable to spiritual interpretation. Here Ricoeur steps within the contemporary hermeneutic circle of Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, on whom he has written. Ricoeur's hermeneutical method, however, has much in common with the methods of biblical exegesis, and in this respect his works should be especially appealing to seminarians and the clergy.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Oneself as Another; Gifford lectures in natural theology; Gifford lectures
• Author: Paul Ricoeur
• Translated by: Kathleen Blamey
• Edition: reprint, reissue
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1994
• ISBN: 0226713296, 9780226713298
• Length: 363 pages
• Subjects: Philosophy / General; Philosophy / History & Surveys / Modern; Philosophy / Mind & Body