Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction Philosophy and Anthropology in Dialogues and Conversations
- Part I Nurturing the Field: Towards Mutual Fecundation and Transformation of Philosophy and Anthropology
- Part II Sources of Philosophical Anthropology
- Chapter 8 Kant and Anthropology
- Chapter 9 Dilthey's Theory of Knowledge and Its Potential for Anthropological Theory
- Chapter 10 Malinowski and Philosophy
- Chapter 11 Ground, Self, Sign: The Semiotic Theories of Charles Sanders Peirce and Their Applications in Social Anthropology
- Chapter 12 Ricoeur's Challenge for a Twenty-First Century Anthropology
- Chapter 13 Clifford Geertz: The Philosophical Transformation of Anthropology
- Chapter 14 Bakhtin's Heritage in Anthropology: Alterity and Dialogue
- Chapter 15 The Philosophy of Slavoj Žižek and Anthropology: The Current Situation and Possible Futures
- Chapter 16 Border Crossings between Anthropology and Buddhist Philosophy
- Part III Philosophical Anthropology at Work
- Afterword The Return of Philosophical Anthropology
Chapter 12 - Ricoeur's Challenge for a Twenty-First Century Anthropology
from Part II - Sources of Philosophical Anthropology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction Philosophy and Anthropology in Dialogues and Conversations
- Part I Nurturing the Field: Towards Mutual Fecundation and Transformation of Philosophy and Anthropology
- Part II Sources of Philosophical Anthropology
- Chapter 8 Kant and Anthropology
- Chapter 9 Dilthey's Theory of Knowledge and Its Potential for Anthropological Theory
- Chapter 10 Malinowski and Philosophy
- Chapter 11 Ground, Self, Sign: The Semiotic Theories of Charles Sanders Peirce and Their Applications in Social Anthropology
- Chapter 12 Ricoeur's Challenge for a Twenty-First Century Anthropology
- Chapter 13 Clifford Geertz: The Philosophical Transformation of Anthropology
- Chapter 14 Bakhtin's Heritage in Anthropology: Alterity and Dialogue
- Chapter 15 The Philosophy of Slavoj Žižek and Anthropology: The Current Situation and Possible Futures
- Chapter 16 Border Crossings between Anthropology and Buddhist Philosophy
- Part III Philosophical Anthropology at Work
- Afterword The Return of Philosophical Anthropology
Summary
Under history, memory and forgetting.
Under memory and forgetting, life.
But writing a life is another story.
Incompletion.
Ricoeur ends his last major book with the above poem (Ricoeur [2000] 2004, 506). This poem is a dance of paradoxes, vividly conjuring up its author and his long life of philosophical labours – a life remarkable for both generous openness and tenacious continuity. In his distinctive mix of solemnity and playfulness, Ricoeur sets up a game of hide and seek in this poem – between text, author and reader, between life and death, between embodiment and disembodiment.
The overt paradoxes in this poem concatenate with silent allusions to the aporias central to earlier works. On the one hand, the poem evokes Heidegger's ideas of humanness as being-towards-death, since Ricoeur would anticipate the readers who would be reading after the irreversible punctuation point of his own bodily death. The English edition of Memory, History, Forgetting would be published just one year before his own death in 2005 at 92 years. Ricoeur dedicates the book to his wife, who died a few years before the French publication, suggesting connections between his philosophic labours and the personal work of mourning. On the other hand, this poem evokes his sustained critique of the understanding of subjectivity as being-towards-death in its ‘one-sided aspect of Heideggerian resoluteness in the face of dying’ (Ricoeur [2000] 2004, 357). Throughout his lengthy oeuvre, Ricoeur turns to ideas of humanness as being towards life, in incompletion and opacity.
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- Information
- Philosophy and AnthropologyBorder Crossing and Transformations, pp. 201 - 216Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013