What makes us human? Exploring the significance of ricoeur's ethical configuration of personhood between naturalism and phenomenology in health care

The aim of this article is to elaborate on how a distinct concept of the person can be implemented within person-centred care as an ethical configuration of personhood in the tension between the two predominant cultures of knowledge within health care: naturalism and phenomenology. Starting from Paul Ricoeur's ‘personalism of the first, second, and third person’ and his ‘broken’ ontology, open-ended, incomplete, and imperfect mediations, placed at the precise juncture where reality is divided up into two separate cultures of knowledge, is identified as crucial for what makes us human. Within this context, Ricoeur's distinct ethical configuration of personhood is based on the homology between the linguistic, practical, narrative, and moral determinations of selfhood—articulated as a hermeneutics of the self, without any methodological break. Person-centred care is thus recognized as an profound ethical approach to health care based on mediations of ‘horizontal’ (teleological) and ‘vertical’ (deontological) readings of an ethical configuration of personhood by the use of practical wisdom.