Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur

VENEMA, Henry Isaac

ISBN 10: 0791446743 / ISBN 13: 9780791446744

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2000

About this Item

xii, 206 p. 23 cm. Paperback. Inscribed by author on first leaf.

Seller Inventory # 129519

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur
• Publisher: State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791446743
• ISBN 13: 9780791446744
• Binding: Softcover
• Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

Traces the decentered formulation of self at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy from his earliest works to his most recent.

Identifying Selfhood provides the first sustained treatment of the development of Paul Ricoeur's decentered formulation of selfhood from his earliest works to his most recent. For Henry Venema, Ricoeur's affirmation that consciousness is always rooted in the signs, symbols, and texts that precede the hermeneutical project of self-recovery and discovery provides the thread that links all of Ricoeur's philosophical inquiries together. However, as Venema argues, Ricoeur's hermeneutic is caught up in the semantics of identity to such an extent that selfhood is confused and often equated with the textuality of the reflective process and is never dealt with on the intimate level of the reflexive structure of selfhood in relation to otherness. In the end, Ricoeur's formulation of alterity identifies the other within the circle of the self-same.

About the Author

Henry Isaac Venema is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Messiah College.