About the Book
Recognition, though it figures profoundly in our understanding of objects and persons, identity and ideas, has never before been the subject of a single, sustained philosophical inquiry. This work, by one of contemporary philosophy's most distinguished voices, pursues recognition through its various philosophical guises and meanings--and, through the "course of recognition," seeks to develop nothing less than a proper hermeneutics of mutual recognition.
Originally delivered as lectures at the Institute for the Human Sciences at Vienna, the essays collected here consider recognition in three of its forms. The first chapter, focusing on knowledge of objects, points to the role of recognition in modern epistemology; the second, concerned with what might be called the recognition of responsibility, traces the understanding of agency and moral responsibility from the ancients up to the present day; and the third takes up the problem of recognition and identity, which extends from Hegel's discussion of the struggle for recognition through contemporary arguments about identity and multiculturalism. Throughout, Paul Ricoeur probes the significance of our capacity to recognize people and objects, and of self-recognition and self-identity in relation to the gift of mutual recognition. Drawing inspiration from such literary texts as The Odyssey and Oedipus at Colonus, and engaging some of the classic writings of the Continental philosophical tradition--by Kant, Hobbes, Hegel, Augustine, Locke, and Bergson--The Course of Recognition ranges over vast expanses of time and subject matter and in the process suggests a number of highly insightful ways of thinking through the major questions of modern philosophy.
Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction 1. Recognition as Identification 2. Recognizing Oneself 3. Mutual Recognition Conclusion: A Review Acknowledgments Works Cited Notes Index
About the Author :
Paul Ricoeur was Professor of Philosophy at the Universities of Paris and Chicago. He is the author of many books, including Time and Narrative, Oneself as Another, and Memory, History, Forgetting.
Review :
A humanist of immense learning, a scholar of both literature and the human sciences (as is evident from Seuil's three-volume edition of his lectures), a traveler receptive to Anglo-Saxon culture and German tradition, Paul Ricoeur is difficult to identify with a single school or intellectual current. Christianity, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and history have all to some extent shaped his thought. But if his ideas are, in essence, most closely allied with Christian existentialism and with personalism, they cannot easily be reduced to a system. It seems that [for Ricoeur] the study of language, far from being an end in itself, was always just another way of asking the questions that long preoccupied him: those of being and of action. Nostalgic for an ontology that Nietzsche seemed to have invalidated, striving to find rules for moral conduct in ethical reasoning, deeply concerned about the age he lived in yet at the same time wary of engaged action, Ricoeur ultimately incarnated -- and reflected the most radical consequences of -- the wrenching contradictions that have characterized humanist thought since the early twentieth century. This tragic authenticity, which illuminates the entire span of his long intellectual journey, also makes his writings exemplary evidence of the "crisis" of our modernity. And it is no doubt this value as "evidence" that explains why his corpus of work -- which was (like the work of his friend Emmanuel Levinas) to some extent misunderstood by French intellectuals -- has, since the mid-1980s, attracted renewed interest in France and even more in the rest of the world. -- Christian Delacampagne Le Monde Ricoeur is one of the major French philosophers of the 20th century. In these essays, originally delivered as lectures at the Institute for the Human Sciences at Vienna, he endeavors to connect the various senses of recognition. We speak, for instance, of recognizing physical objects, recognizing other people, recognizing our responsibility for actions, and being recognized by others. Ricoeur finds a transition from an active to a passive voice in these various senses of the verb to recognize and organizes his discussion around this transition. He begins by focusing on the knowledge of objects, with a careful account of Immanuel Kant's move away from the substantial self of Rene Descartes. He then considers Henri Bergson's notion of memory and moves on to an analysis of mutual recognition that heavily stresses the discussions of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. With his characteristic erudition, Ricoeur also surveys the views of sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss as well as those of his successors and critics. He displays a remarkable ability to convey sympathetically the ideas of a widely disparate group of thinkers and makes an excellent case, in readily comprehensible language, for the centrality of recognition in modern philosophy. -- David Gordon Library Journal 20051101 The book is one of Ricoeur's last works (he died in 2005), and it fittingly recapitulates many of the themes he explored over his long career. But that is how his books proceed: retaining the results of his earlier studies, yet always reevaluating them in light of new ideas and discoveries. Ricoeur exemplifies a desire to learn from others, whatever their discipline, and this book exhibits the unique blend of tenacity, charity, and modesty that characterizes his thought in general. -- Brian Gregor Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 20060201 [Ricoeur] has a quality which is not as common among philosophers as it ought to be; that is the ability to see what their presumptions and prejudices are and the desire not to pounce on them triumphantly but sympathetically and sensibly to set things right. This book, which makes reference to a number of works of literature as well as to the work of many philosophers, may be of interest, therefore, to readers of this chronique...This work's worth will long be recognized. -- Leonard R. N. Ashley Chronique 20070101
