On numerous occasions Ricoeur has characterized the goal of his philosophical analyses as the "exchange of the ego, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text." Our investigation follows the development of this theme through careful examination of Ricoeur's phenomenological-hermeneutical philosophy. By way of contrast with Husserl's phenomenology we see how Ricoeur initiates a program of self-recovery that decenters consciousness from the immediacy of self-grounding radicality. Looking instead to the polysemic world of the text, Ricoeur chooses a path of indirect imaginative mediation as the route towards self-interpretation. / The imagination, correlative with the works of culture (signs, symbols and texts), forms the central core of Ricoeur's understanding of selfhood. Already operative in his early publications as the mediating structure of selfhood, the work of imagination is transformed from a transcendental third term into a linguistic process that constructs sonorous worlds in front of consciousness for the self to inhabit. / Ricoeur's analysis of metaphor and narrative shows selfhood to be a task accomplished by means of linguistic interpretation. However, such an interpretation of the self, with the textual world as its other, is a linguistic construction that is caught up in semantic self-identification. Ricoeur's program for the exchange of the self-enclosed ego, for a self discipled by the text, becomes entangled in the semantics of identity to such an extent that selfhood is equated with the objectifications of the reflective process and is never dealt with on the intimate level of the reflexive structure of the self in relation to otherness. This has significant consequences which need to be critically examined by philosophy of religion.

Nietzsche urges us not to embrace any one perspective of the world, at the same time as he vociferously and repeatedly attacks whole ways of life. These two aspects of Nietzsche's work seem to be in tension with one another--what perspective allows Nietzsche to be so opinionated? Nietzsche insists that all experience is from a perspective and that there is no inherently privileged perspective. This is the "perspectivist" Nietzsche that Derrida focuses on. Yet not only does Nietzsche insist on denigrating the perspective of others, he seems to acknowledge that such attacks are not very worthwhile if they too are just from another perspective. Thus thinkers like Schacht argue that there is a privileged perspective in Nietzsche, and that this privilege is unique because of the relationship it has with the "natural" and the "healthy." The Gay Science presents a Nietzsche who integrates these two seemingly incompatible positions, for in this work Nietzsche makes an exciting synthesis possible through the idea of the eternal recurrence and through his attack on the unitary self. Nietzsche urges us to create ourselves as affirmers, but the stance of affirmation is not in itself a perspective; rather, a central characteristic of affirmers is the ability to embrace numerous perspectives.

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In this thesis I investigate the relationship between 'I' as principle of transcendental philosophy and its ordinary use as first-personal pronoun. This relationship is a central issue in the philosophy of J. G. Fichte. Fichte was concerned to secure the gains made by Kant's Critique against what he called the 'dogmatism of the so-called Kantians' as well as against the attack of the skeptics, by grounding philosophy in a first principle which he called 'I'. To say what Fichte means by 'I' is to give an account of his philosophy, for, according to him, nothing is to be assumed outside of this 'I'. For Fichte the dogmatism of the 'so-called Kantians' consists in the idea that even when the formal conditions of experience have been established, a non-conceptualized content needs to be given to the mind from outside in order to produce empirical knowledge. This way of conceiving empirical constraints of thought, according to Fichte, threatens the results of Kant's critical philosophy, because it is inconsistent with the theoretical spontaneity and the practical autonomy that are crucial to Kant's conception of reason. Fichte argues that adequate empirical constraints can only be deduced from within the 'I'. To do this we must radically rethink our received concept of an 'I', a rethinking which in essence has already been effectuated by Kant, and which Fichte merely wants to make explicit and bring to fruition. Adequate constraints can be seen to be generated internally, once we realize that the standpoint of the 'theoretical I' is derivative from the standpoint of the 'practical I'. A result of Fichte's emphasis on the practical aspect of reason is a heightened awareness of the concept of the individual person and its status vis-a-vis the 'I' as philosophical principle. To be consistent with his principle, and indeed to prove his point, Fichte must 'deduce' the 'I' as individual. / Fichte's repudiation of dogmatism bears striking resemblances to a contemporary reading of Kant associated with the works of P. F. Strawson and John McDowell. The crucial difference is that for these philosophers the concept of a person is taken as primitive, and hence as the starting point of philosophy. At Fichte's time this position was defended by Fichte's critic, F. H. Jacobi. In the thesis I develop a position in contrast with Fichte's idealism which I call a 'naturalism of second nature' and which I use as a conceptual foil to explicate Fichte's thinking. I argue that ultimately Fichte's project fails by his own standards, in that it fails to save what we normally mean by a moral individual. I argue that in order to conceive of adequate constraints on freedom, we need to make the concept of a person as a natural individual our point of departure.

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