Memory, identity, in the writings of Paul Ricoeur

This paper explores the relationship between memory, history and identity from the perspective of Ricoeur's philosophical hermeneutics, in which the concept of memory integrates those of history and forgetting. This approach puts in a new light the ancient truth of the hypostasis of memory as a condition for the recognition of identity both at the individual and collective level and at the same time the contexts of human creativity. Thanks to memory, the imagination can bring faces, events, facts from the past back into the present and, in this sense, memory as a "province of the imagination" beyond its temporalizing function could play a heuristic role, namely to discover the use of memory not only by ideology as an expression of the social imaginary, intended to legitimize power, but also to recognize and build an authentic identity, to understand human being..