Recognition and Emancipation

The dialectic process is the key-term of Ricœur’s philosophical perspective on recognition. In some ways, the question of recognition is already present in his early writings. However the idea of recognition as a dialectical process made its mark in the sixties, throughout the inter-twine of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (revisited by Alexander Kojève) with a hermeneu-tics of Freud’s psychoanalysis. The philosophy of the ‘capable human being’, which is the core of the The Course of Recognition, puts forward a conception of human development focused on the idea of emancipation as a dialectical process, or more precisely as a dialectic of recogni-tion. In other words, in Ricœur the dialectic of recognition is connected to the anthropological and sociological concept of emancipation, or better, to the concept of emancipation as process of emancipation (psychological, moral, social, and so on). The paper is focused on the relation-ship between recognition and emancipation, thematising Ricœur’s contribution to all these dif-ferent areas.