<em>Oneself as Another</em>

Oneself as Another (Soi-même comme un autre, 1990) is Ricoeur's culminating statement on personal identity and ethics. Delivered as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh (1986), the work synthesizes phenomenology, analytic philosophy of action, hermeneutics, and ethics into a comprehensive theory of the self. The title encodes the argument: the self (soi-même) is constituted through its relationship to what it is not (comme un autre)—the other person, the text, the tradition, the conscience. The book's ten studies develop: the linguistic structure of selfhood, the theory of action, personal identity across time, the narrative constitution of the self, and the ethical dimension—culminating in the thesis that selfhood is not a possession but a task, achieved through the ongoing work of promise-keeping and accountability to others. For the AI age, the work offers the most adequate philosophical resources for understanding what happens to the self when its story breaks.