Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition

A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity

By (author) Timo Helenius Brown University

Publication date:

26 August 2016

Length of book:

254 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

236x158mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781498520935

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.
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.