Description
Book SynopsisIn Paul Ricoeur's Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology: Vulnerability, Capability, Justice, Marc de Leeuw contextualizes Ricoeur's work in the largely forgotten tradition of philosophical anthropology. In the book, de Leeuw shows how the original diagnosis of the human as suffering from a primordial deficiency, lack, or wounded cogito becomes the main motivation for Ricoeur's phenomenological and hermeneutic renewal of this tradition. Ricoeur thereby connects the human ability for self-expression with our capability to speak, act, narrate, remember, and be held accountable. De Leeuw argues that through the poetic and ethical reconfiguration of our experiences a reflexive selfhood emerges, one able to attest to whom it stands for, thereby replacing the traditional anthropological question what is the human? with who is the human?
In times of climate change, viral emergency, and democratic crisis, the question of the human is more important than ever. How does our philosophica
Trade Review
"Marc de Leeuw’s expansive study offers a timely account of the ethical resonances of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology. Through tracing the development of Ricoeur’s thought through many of his major works, de Leeuw lays out formative ideas that figure prominently in Ricoeur’s conception of the capable human being."
-- Roger W. H. Savage, University of California, Los Angeles
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Paul Ricoeur and the Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology
Part I Anthropology: The Question of the Human
Chapter 1: The German School of Philosophical Anthropology
Chapter 2: Philosophical Anthropology as Existential Phenomenology
Part II Poetics: A Phenomenological-Hermeneutic of Human Self-Expression
Chapter 3: Being, Narrative, and Identity
Chapter 4: Persons, Selfhood, and Otherness
Chapter 5: Memory, Remembering, and Historicity
Part III Ethics: A Life Lived with and among Others
Chapter 6: Moral Imperatives, Solicitude and Critical Phronesis
Chapter 7: The Just, Forgiveness, and Unconditional Affirmation
Conclusion: The Affirmation of Life between Vulnerability and Capability
Notes
Bibliography
Index
