Key Arguments

• Ricoeur explicitly adopts Strawson’s strategy from Individuals as his initial framework: "In Individuals, P. F. Strawson develops a strategy which we shall adopt as a general framework within which we shall later place new analyses, as we work toward a determination of the self that is increasingly ample and concrete."
• Strawson’s strategy is to isolate certain ‘privileged particulars’ called basic particulars: "This strategy consists in isolating, among all the par- (Kiilars to which wc may refer in order to identify them (in the sense of individualizing given above), privileged particulars belonging to a certain type, which the author calls 'basic particulars.'"
• Persons and physical bodies are the two such basic particulars: "Physical bodies and the persons we ourselves are constitute, in this masterful strategy, such basic particulars in the sense that nothing at all can be identified unless it ulti mately refers to one or the other of these two kinds of particulars."
• From this, Ricoeur infers the primitiveness of the concept ‘person’: "In this way, the concept of person, just as that of physical body, is held to be a primitive concept, to the extent that there is no way to go beyond it, without presupposing it in the argument that would claim to derive it from something else."
• He characterizes his forthcoming use of Strawson in transcendental terms: "What we are going to undertake is indeed a sort of transcendental deduction of the notion of person, by showing that if we did not have available to us the schema of thought that defines this notion, we could not engage in the empirical descriptions that we make in this regard in ordinary conversation and in the human sciences."

Source Quotes

This strategy consists in isolating, among all the par- (Kiilars to which wc may refer in order to identify them (in the sense of individualizing given above), privileged particulars belonging to a certain type, which the author calls "basic particulars." Physical bodies and the persons we ourselves are constitute, in this masterful strategy, such basic particulars in the sense that nothing at all can be identified unless it ulti mately refers to one or the other of these two kinds of particulars. In this way, the concept of person, just as that of physical body, is held to be a primitive concept, to the extent that there is no way to go beyond it, without presupposing it in the argument that would claim to derive it from something else.

Physical bodies and the persons we ourselves are constitute, in this masterful strategy, such basic particulars in the sense that nothing at all can be identified unless it ulti mately refers to one or the other of these two kinds of particulars. In this way, the concept of person, just as that of physical body, is held to be a primitive concept, to the extent that there is no way to go beyond it, without presupposing it in the argument that would claim to derive it from something else. If we had to provide an ancestor for this strategy, it would most cer tainly be Kant—not the Kant of the second Critique, but instead the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason.

If we had to provide an ancestor for this strategy, it would most cer tainly be Kant—not the Kant of the second Critique, but instead the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason. What we are going to undertake is indeed a sort of transcendental deduction of the notion of person, by showing that if we did not have available to us the schema of thought that defines this notion, we could not engage in the empirical descriptions that we make in this regard in ordinary conversation and in the human sciences. Let us note straightaway that this treatment of the person as a basic particular docs not stress the capacity belonging to the person to designate himself or herself in speaking, as will be the case in later studies based on the power of the subject of utterance to designate itself; here, the person is one of the "things" about which we speak rather than itself a speaking subject.

Key Concepts

• Physical bodies and the persons we ourselves are constitute, in this masterful strategy, such basic particulars in the sense that nothing at all can be identified unless it ulti mately refers to one or the other of these two kinds of particulars.
• the concept of person, just as that of physical body, is held to be a primitive concept, to the extent that there is no way to go beyond it, without presupposing it in the argument that would claim to derive it from something else.
• What we are going to undertake is indeed a sort of transcendental deduction of the notion of person, by showing that if we did not have available to us the schema of thought that defines this notion, we could not engage in the empirical descriptions that we make in this regard in ordinary conversation and in the human sciences.

Context

Early in section 2, ‘The Person as a Basic Particular’, Ricoeur introduces and endorses Strawson’s notion of basic particulars as the initial semantic framework for thinking about persons, framing his own project as a kind of transcendental deduction of the concept of person from conditions of possible empirical discourse.