Identity and recognition in legacy of the linguistic turn. The looks of P. Ricoeur and P. F. Strawson

Abstract

I hereby frame the positions of these two eminent and contemporary thinkers of language and identity, namely Paul Ri­coeur (1913-2005) and Peter Strawson (1919-2006), within their respective philosophical perspectives which is for Ricoeur the so called hermeneutic Phenomenology, with an amount of french linguistic structuralism and psychoanalysis, and for Strawson its wittgenstei­nian pragmatic perspective combined with its own interpretation of Kant, as an epistemic conceptual ontology (in spite of an absolute noumenical Realism). Besides the contrast of both traditions it is observed in the following reflections the use that Ricoeur made in the nineties of the strawsonian notion of person as the base of its own decentralized idea of the self. ln fact, the idea of a self that is not the possessive self of the first-person private introspection but a public self in an ipseity circuit with others owes some insights to the strawsonian descriptive ontology of the fúties, as Paul Ricoeur recognized in 1990. N onetheless Ricoeur' s dimension of the narra tive time in the construction of self-identity is not in Strawson descriptive ontology, so that the perspectives of both thinkers will at che end radically diverge on personal identity in a way that is consistent with the gap between pragmatics and hermeneutics. Keywords: Ricoeur; Strawson; narrative self-identity.