Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity

by Timo Helenius Brown University

Overview

Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity presents Paul Ricoeur’s work—from its beginning to its end—as a form of a cultural theory. Timo Helenius proposes a cultural hermeneutic that clarifies the cultural facilitation in a person’s process of attaining a sense of being a human. Incorporating insights from Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, this exploration of human beings as being profoundly formed and influenced by the cultural condition also enables a new understanding of intercultural questions by revealing the common human condition that the various cultures manifest. Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition will be of interest not only to philosophers, but also to scholars in theology, linguistics, cultural studies, and the social sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498520942
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	08/26/2016
Series:	Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	254
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Timo Helenius is Alfred Kordelin Research Fellow at Boston College.

Table of Contents

PART I INTRODUCTION: RICOEUR, CULTURE, AND HERMENEUTICS
1. General Introduction
2. Ricoeur and the Question of Culture
3. Ricoeur and Postcritical Hermeneutics
PART IITHE CULTURAL COURSE OF RECOGNITION
4. Ricoeur and Cultural Anthropology
5. A Hermeneutic of Symbolic Recognition
6. The Course of Cultural Formation
7. Reflections on Re-
PART III RECOGNIZING SELFHOOD IN CULTURAL OBJECTIVITY
8. Anthropology and Objectivity
9. The Objects of Human Works
10. A Hermeneutic of Cultural Objects
11. Reflections on -Con-
PART IVTHE ETHO-POETIC ESSENCE OF CULTURE
12. Poetics and the Becoming of Cultural Being
13. Poetics of Cultural Action
14. Etho-poetics: the Essence of Cultural Existence
15. Reflections on -Naissance
PART VTHE FIFTH ACT: RE-CON-NAISSANCE
16. A Responsive Self: Naïve Summation

Editorial Reviews

Timo Helenius offers a scholarly and pioneering insight into Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of culture. His analyses of the ethical and political role of symbolism and selfhood are breathing in their originality and depth. An invaluable contribution to contemporary hermeneutical debate.

Richard Kearney

Timo Helenius’s Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition importantly and rightly contends that the work of Paul Ricoeur rests in a hermeneutic of culture. This thesis is an important corrective to any view that Ricoeur concentrates on individual understanding or individual ethics. The book is insightful also in linking the role of culture to what typically has been viewed as Ricoeur’s separate work on recognition. It is through cultural recognition that someone can find himself or herself as an ethico-political subject. This book is particularly perspicacious in its understanding and delineation of the sweep of Ricoeur’s corpus.

George H. Taylor

This book makes a compelling argument that we have not understood Ricoeur until we have understood his work as a cultural theorist, and that we cannot understand that work without understanding the role played by recognition in his hermeneutics. As such, it represents a provocation—though a friendly one—to the more established work on Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology. This is a book that springs from a close and careful reading of Ricoeur’s work, and will be a source insight and debate for philosophers pursuing his hermeneutic project.

Brian Treanor

Timo Helenius’s Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition importantly and rightly contends that the work of Paul Ricoeur rests in a hermeneutic of culture. This thesis is an important corrective to any view that Ricoeur concentrates on individual understanding or individual ethics. The book is insightful also in linking the role of culture to what typically has been viewed as Ricoeur’s separate work on recognition. It is through cultural recognition that someone can find himself or herself as an ethico-political subject. This book is particularly perspicacious in its understanding and delineation of the sweep of Ricoeur’s corpus.

George Taylor