Paul Ricoeur

How can religiously affiliated institutions that promote liberal arts maintain commitment both to their affiliation and to the ideal of religious inclusivity? What principles of accreditation should be used by agencies—such as the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges—in assessing religiously affiliated yet inclusive institutions? Many religiously affiliated institutions claim to value liberal arts learning and critical inquiry, to prepare students for a diverse world. Yet affiliation often brings with it pervasive structures of religious privilege that inhibit (...) questioning and critical thinking, especially with regard to religions. I bring Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics and his approach to religious inclusivity developed in his essay “Religious Belief” (2010) to bear on these issues. Ricoeur uses the models of translation and multilingualism to promote what he calls religious “hospitality.” Through this Ricoeurian approach, I develop principles of inclusivity for use in accrediting religiously affiliated colleges. (shrink)

How can personal identity be determined in such a way that developments, experiences and other dynamic and context-dependent aspects of that identity can be taken into account? For several decades now, the narrative, the story, has often been referred to in answering this question as a cognitive instrument that can adequately deal with those aspects. The monologue thus appears to present itself as a medium in which personal or autobiographical identity is formed. However, what happens when we place the identity (...) narrative in a dialogue: when two people with very diverse backgrounds have a dialogue that touches on their identity? Does this perhaps provide an entirely new challenge and enrichment of that narrative, which can have a major impact on both the individual and the relationship? I want to explore these questions in this article, motivated by both the philosophical perspective and my experiences as co-initiator of the "Keti Koti Table", in which such a dialogue plays a central role. To this end, I will first discuss the dynamic aspects of the narrative, in which the phenomenon of "refiguration" as presented by Ricoeur is key. This is then discussed in the context of the dialogue. In § 4 I discuss the specific dialogue method that we have developed for the Keti Koti Table. Subsequently, in § 5, some experiences of participants are discussed, whose identity refigurations are analyzed under the influence of the dialogue in § 6. It is concluded with a brief conclusion about the special significance of the dialogue for the narrative self-constitution in a diverse society. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to show that a familiar hermeneutical movement from suspicion to affirmation of rational meaning, as a reader reflects on a narrative, is, in part, grounded in the narrative's rhythmic structure which mediates a sonorous condition of being appropriated by the reader. This hermeneutical process involves the reader in appropriating the temporal perspective which creates a 'space' for reflection in which a provisional conceptual unity is made possible, but subject to continuing movement from suspicion to (...) affirmation. It is shown that this relationship between Self and Other is dialectical, and mediated by the textual modes of metaphor and narrative. Particular examples of poetry and prose are examined, and the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac in the 'Authorised Version' of the Bible is analyzed in detail in an attempt to show how the reader, imaginatively inhabiting the world of the text, is involved in a process in which there is an 'instant' of letting go Self reflection; and there is affirmation of reasonable hope that the narrative may be rationally understood. In an attempt to address the critical issue of validation of rational meaning to show that affirmation may be given reasonable hope, the analogy of juridical legality is examined, particularly with respect to Aristotle's notion of phronesis. The analysis draws upon the hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur with particular regard to his theories of metaphor and narrative, and the role of the creative imagination. It also makes use of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the lived body in terms of a dialectical relationship between its material objectivity and its phenomenological aspects, especially, with respect to sonorous being and corporeal intentionality. From the discipline of literary criticism, Northrop Frye's notion of prose rhythm in his Anatomy of Criticism is employed to identity this key mediatory characteristic. (shrink)

Introduction to “Penser le temps/Thinking Time” french version.

Introduction to “Penser le temps/Thinking Time” english versiion.

Starting from Ricœur’s last meditations on death, time, and eternity, we first seek to show the difficulties of Whitehead’s idea of a memory of God who would be “the great monad”, or the Hegelian recapitulation. The navigation then reverses towards the insurmountable plurality of temporalities. In the wake of Marielle Macé’s work on style, we will seek not only in narrativity, which is itself a form of resistance to totalizations, but in all genres and forms of language, the infinitely varied (...) ways of dealing with time. If we agree to reintegrate the Ricœurian studies of biblical literature into the philosophical field, we will resituate biblical narrative, itself inseparable from the prescriptive of the Torah which is always already there, in its textual intersection with other biblical literary genres, the broken time of the prophetic irruption, the eternal everydayness of wisdom literature, the metaphorical games of the hymn, etc. (shrink)

Beyond the disparate and mainly fleeting references to life in Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another, whether as life as power, living well and with others, or as Ricoeur’s attempt to develop a concept of embodied subjectivity as flesh, which is presumably living flesh, not dead flesh, a further and arguably primordial life principle needs emphasis, namely, living space. Ricoeur’s recognition of the vital significance of space primordiality, as a pivotal dimension that is even prior to language, offers a significant conceptual leap (...) in Ricoeur’s later work, Oneself as Another. Ricoeur’s proposed ontology of the flesh is one dimension towards expression of an authentic phenomenology of spatiality, though not necessarily the only one. Building upon but going beyond Ricoeur, the article explores concentric and diametric spatial interplay in relation to the early Heidegger’s existential spatiality, Angst and care, as candidate living spatial movements. This proposed primordial spatial discourse re-examines Ricoeur’s conatus as power to act, and his quest for a structure of relation to the other that is not closure, separation, or diametric opposition. (shrink)

The article draws a parallel between Ricœur’s critique of Heidegger’s conception of temporality and the demand for a more general critique of Heidegger’s philosophy. If Ricœur denied a proximity between Being and Time and Time and Narrative, he placed himself within a philosophical vein that addresses Heidegger’s first philosophy. But our knowledge of Heidegger’s Complete Works, including the “Black Notebooks,” requires integrating criticism of links between Heidegger and national-socialist ideology. In addition to various critical contents within Time and Narrative and (...) developments related to the social sciences, the explicit reference to scientific concepts of time must also be highlighted. Ricœur breaks with Heidegger’s philosophy of time as inseparable from Ricœur’s reformulation of the issue of being and attempts to determine a conception of time engaging an ontological and epistemological critique of Being and Time. (shrink)

Questioning Ricœur’s positioning of Aristotle and Augustine as the founders of the two mutually exclusive conceptions of time that dichotomize the Western tradition, this article suggests that what Ricœur describes as the aporetics of temporality is a product of the modern social time regime. Extracting Aristotle and Augustine’s conceptions of time from this modern problem reveals the Aristotelian so-called “naturalist” view of time as one that rather unifies humans and their world through symbolic mediation, while Augustine’s alleged “subjective” conception of (...) time is read rather as expressing the subordination of time to divine transcendence. (shrink)

Time as a collective singular cannot be fully captured by Ricoeur’s poetic response to the aporias of time. Ricoeur works on this question in particular from Kant, Husserl and Heidegger, and, at the end of Time and Narrative, returns to the question of the unicity of history, discussing Hegel and reappropriating Koselleck’s concepts of the horizon of expectation and the space of experience. We present this inquiry, discuss the reservations expressed about it, and propose to open two ways for a (...) deepening of Ricœurian thought. The first provides a framework for the idea of “learning together”; the second aims at the very possibility of a "we.". (shrink)

The aporias of time that Paul Ricœur identifies in the conclusion to his three-volume Time and Narrative offer a fecund starting-point from which to consider how the poetics of narrativity figures in a philosophy of the will. By setting the poetics of narrativity against the aporetics of temporality, Ricoeur highlights the narrative art’s operative power in drawing together incidents and events in answer to time’s dispersion across the present, the past, and the future. In turn, the confession of the limits (...) of narrative opens the way to a broader consideration of the idea of the unity of history in the absence of a meta-historical plot. This idea calls for a reflection on the ethical and political imperative of making freedom a reality for all. By taking the theory of freedom’s actualization as a touchstone, I argue that the vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricœur is the intended object of the poetics of the will acquires the force of a directive idea. The capacity to refashion the real from within thus proves to be decisive for drawing out the connection between the aporetics of temporality, the poetics of narrativity, and Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Presentation of the Excellence Award at the Fonds Ricœur’s Summer Workshop 2019.

Présentation du Prix d’excellence de l’édition 2019 des Ateliers d’été du Fonds Ricœur.

What is the task – rather than the contribution – of philosophy with regards to language? In this article, we revisit Paul Ricœur’s answer to this question in his text “Philosophie et langage.” Ricœur sets forth as the task of philosophy the recovery of a triple linguistic mediation: from language to the world, from language to the subject, and from language to the human community. Starting from the concrete experience of speaking subjects, Ricœur opposes the systemic closure presupposed by the (...) structuralistic view on language, which suspends the function of reference in the relation of meaning between two ideas. Provided with an enlarged conception of reference, one that includes the poetic function of language, the philosopher extricates from the notion of “the world of the text” the constitutive ontological dimension of language, since in its poetic function the latter reveals the multiple possibilities of our mode of existence. We point towards the connection between the reopening of that triple linguistic mediation and the call to an elaboration of a new ontology, one that Ricœur accomplishes through the notion of attestation. (shrink)

Cet article compare deux livres majeurs : La Symbolique du mal, de Paul Ricœur et La Littérature et le mal, de Georges Bataille. L’articulation de ces deux penseurs que tout semble opposer répond à l’espoir de dégager une forme de compatibilité productive entre eux à travers leur intérêt commun pour le langage du mal. On insistera tout d’abord sur Ricœur : c’est en reconnaissant que le dire de l’expérience du mal passe d’abord nécessairement par un langage symbolique qu’il nous permet (...) de penser l’insistance de Bataille sur la place de la littérature quant au mal. On montrera ensuite que l’affirmation par Bataille d’une lucidité littéraire moderne du mal, tout en permettant de confirmer les thèses de Ricœur au sujet du caractère à la fois historique et langagier de l’expérience du mal, nous conduit aussi à en formuler la principale conséquence : que le langage du mal, marqué du sceau de la créativité poétique, ne peut sans doute pas être tenu pour achevé. On soulignera enfin l’intérêt de cette approche pour interpréter, avec la littérature, les nouvelles expériences du mal aujourd’hui. (shrink)

The way of conceiving what a text is comes from an understanding of the sources of meaning; this conception stems from a philosophical position not only on language but also on discursive practices such as interpretation and translation. From an example borrowed from the Bible, and from the conception that Ricœur develops of what he means by “text,” we will show what impasses lead to interpretations and, therefore, to translations that refuse to situate the sources of meaning in the texts.

Both Derrida and Ricœur address philosophy’s relation to metaphor, and both take Aristotle as their starting points. However, though Ricœur’s The Rule of Metaphor is largely a response to Derrida’s “White Mythology,” Ricœur seems to pass right over Derrida’s critically important interpretation of Aristotle. In this essay, I dispel concerns that Ricœur may have been intellectually irresponsible in his engagement with Derrida on this point, and I demonstrate how Study 1 makes better sense as a detailed response to Derrida.

This essay critically examines the place that the reference holds relative to law, and more broadly to the legal phenomenon, in the final phase of Ricœur’s reflection on the capable subject. References to the law and more in general to the legal sphere play an increasingly relevant role in the later reflections of Ricœur, in particular in articulating its “little ethics.” This is done, by contrast, through a deep reconfiguration of some fundamental legal categories, in particular that of legal subject (...) and that of responsibility. The implications of this theoretical renewal will be examined both as regards the internal articulation of Ricœur’s late thought as well as regards their potential repercussions for the contemporary legal theory. (shrink)

Ricœur’s meeting with Greimas was not an ephemeral event but a discussion that spanned more than thirty years. Anne Henault traces the different stages of what Ricœur called his “love fight” with Greimas, perfectly illustrated in the poem by René Char: “Loyal opponents.” The qualities of the philosopher emerges in dialogue, the concern to advance reasoning in a rigorous way but also the effort to give to the speaker “the chance of his best argument.” Anne Henault recounts the labeling of (...) structuralism as an “enemy” and the conquest of a “friendship” as mutually demanding but based on genuine intellectual convergences. (shrink)

This article aims to stimulate dispute about the justification of Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutic reading of John Rawls. Offering a close, methodically point-for-point textual engagement, I shall propose that Ricœur’s misreading of certain hermeneutic circularities in Rawls is owed to some confusion about the role of the procedural nature of Rawls’ theory. Generally speaking, the problems with Ricœur’s interpretations center on the question of whether there is something “pre-understood” within the formal theoretical understanding of the procedural theory of justice and the (...) substantive convictions and judgments that figure within the reflective equilibrium of deliberations about the terms of justice. Arguably, Ricœur has not made a satisfactory case that the difference and liberty principles are considered convictions that anticipate their discovery and establishment. Ultimately, Ricœur has not demonstrated that there is a single presuppositional form that renders Rawls’ procedure self-defeating. Instead, he has proposed to us several potential forms of damaging presupposition, each of which is based on a questionable reading of Rawls’ text. (shrink)

Introductory note to the thematic issue of ERRS 2020 11 1.

In this article, I investigate Ricœur’s definition of philosophy by addressing two of its most fundamental conditions: meaning, which somehow constitutes its inner material, and reflexivity, which is the principle of its dynamic articulation. I proceed in two steps. First, I distinguish five different levels of discourse, underlining the originality of each of them: descriptive, transphrastic, self-comprehensive, anthropological, metaphysical. Then I explain the role played by reflexivity, both in its intra- and inter-semiotic dimension, in delimitating these various levels and helping (...) the transition from one to another. In conclusion, I show that the whole of Ricœur’s philosophy can be characterized by a confidence in language, in its both obstinate and cautious effort to “enlighten existence” by pushing the limits of its fontiers. (shrink)

Introduction of ERRS 2020, 11, 1, “Paul Ricœur: Penser au risque du langage / Paul Ricœur: The Challenges of The Language”.

Introduction of ERRS 2020 11 1, “Paul Ricœur: Penser au risque du langage / Paul Ricœur: The Challenges of The Language”.

This article aims to address, by means of a two-step analysis, the foundations of the relationship between history and psychoanalysis as “disciplinary practices” that deal with the past. In the first step, I examine the different relationships between history and psychoanalysis but also the uses of psychoanalysis in historical approaches. My goal here is to situate the context and the guiding questions. As a second step, I try to show that Ricœur puts forward, in his book Memory, History, Forgetting, a (...) major thesis regarding the foundations of the relationship between psychoanalysis and the hermeneutics of history. By means of the phenomenology of wounded memory, he identifies a fundamental structure of collective existence that provides the basis of this relationship. Finally, I seek to determine the scope of this structure, which takes the form of an originary trauma affecting the collective existence, by drawing an analogy with the psychoanalytic concept of afterwardsness. (shrink)

This article aims to show that the practice of attention can create an openness to the truth, from where ethics arises. It does so by exploring the role attention plays, according to Ricoeur, in Freud’s thought. Ricoeur shows how in the first stage of Freud’s thinking – that of the Project of a Scientific Psychology – attention is one of the instances in which a purely mechanical quantitative explanation can be questioned. Further on, with the introduction of narcissism, Ricœur shows (...) that attention, insofar as it opens a space for the “wounding truth,” opposes narcissism. Finally, the article explains how in the therapeutic setting an attentional epochē allows the therapist to be “the reality principle in flesh and in act,” so that the ego can gain control. According to Ricœur, this non-judgmental gaze opens a space of truthfulness for the patient’s self-knowledge which, although not being the totality of ethics, constitutes its threshold. (shrink)

Inroduction à ERRS 2019 10 2 “La sagesse pratique”.

Introduction to ERRS 2019 10 2 “Practical Wisdom”.

The “small” Ricœurian ethic disrupts the classical presentations of different ethics because of the place it gives to the moral imagination and the tragic. Difficult to classify in the panorama of contemporary ethics, the Ricœurian project values the pluralism of moral traditions as practical preunderstandings while giving practical creativity a prominent place. This tension of traditions and ethical imagination gives his practical wisdom a dynamic and heuristic character. This article shows the fruitfulness of this wisdom in an age of pluralistic (...) and complex societies, and deploys its practical significance. It analyzes, first, cells of good advice, where practical inventiveness is mobilized. Second, through discussion of the work of Ricœur and Nussbaum, it then studies, within the framework of the economy where the role and place given to play is central, the place of imagination in an anthropology of the capable human being. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to justify the view that hermeneutical practice as a philosophical proposal cannot be reduced to the extraction of hidden meanings or the explication of text structures but instead contains ethical assumptions and implications. Following Ricœur’s work, I will show that literary texts are part of ethics insofar as they create different mental experiments about ideas and values. I will show that the interpretation of literary texts, woven by the free play of imagination, constitutes a (...) practice in which readers have the possibility of reconfiguring their way of looking at the world and acting. The reading of literature is an exercise of practical wisdom by enabling readers to rehearse and enable the implementation of the good life in just institutions. To achieve the paper’s goal, I initially discuss ethical assumptions present in literary texts. I then develop Ricœur’s notion of hermeneutics as used for the interpretation of literature. Finally, I propose several ethical implications resulting from the hermeneutical practice that is related to literary texts. (shrink)

In this article, I will analyze Paul Ricœur’s conception of the function of “figurability” in psychoanalysis, namely through his reading of the “psychoanalytic discovery” where language works at the pictorial level [langage figuré]. This reading provides another notion of the image for his hermeneutics insofar as Ricœur calls into question the submission of the image in relation to language. From this reading, I will argue that the connection between the “work of image,” in his reading of psychoanalysis, and the “work” (...) of metaphor, in his theory of metaphor, leads to the expansion of the conception of metaphor insofar as it reveals a level of visualization where language does not control the image. (shrink)

Human experience has a symbolic structure. By focusing on the symbolism of human action, this essay considers the reciprocal influences and the essential differences between Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics and Clifford Geertz’s cultural anthropology. Through reference to Ricœur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, the section on “Ideology, Utopia, and Politics” in From Text to Action, and Geertz’s 1973 book The Interpretation of Cultures, this paper aims at reconstructing the dialogue between these thinkers. I begin with a broad framing of the encounter (...) between Ricœur and Geertz, and then turn to the notion of the symbolic mediation of action, considering it as the shared key concept between these authors. These reflections will lead to an examination of the semiotic conception of culture, opening up the discussion of a nonpejorative dimension of ideology. (shrink)

This essay considers Paul Ricœur’s early notion of cultural memory from 1956-1960. He discusses it in two texts: “What does Humanism Mean?” and the slightly later The Symbolism of Evil. In the former, cultural memory appears as an ongoing and dynamic process of retroaction focussed on questioning and rethinking the meaning of classical antiquity for contemporary worlds, on the one hand, that is linked to an important critical aspect as a counterweight to the flattening effects of modernity, on the other. (...) In the latter, cultural memory expands the reach of the classical heritage, and, in addition to retroaction, further modes of orientation, such as relations of depth and breadth, are delineated. At first glance, cultural memory, in Ricœur’s sense, appears to be embodied in the singular, albeit generalized self. Yet, in reconstructing its meaning, the essay argues that Ricœur’s articulation of cultural memory relies on an implicit collective dimension. The present essay’s hermeneutic reconstruction of Ricœur’s notion of cultural memory comprises a preliminary step of a broader project that aims to rearticulate Jan and Aleida Assmann’s cultural memory framework along social imaginary lines. In this vein, the essay concludes with an overview of the Assmannian approach to cultural memory and considers possible bridges between Ricœur and the Assmanns. (shrink)

This article proposes to address the question of embodiment in Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology, choosing to focus its analysis on these two major works, the Philosophy of the Will and Oneself as Another. It argues that Ricœur’s thought on embodiment consists in developing an analysis of the lived body as fragile mediation, striving to articulate two complementary dialectics. A first dialectic of act and power expresses the ontological and operating character of this dynamic process of mediation, while a second dialectic of (...) activity and passivity points to the limits and to the vulnerability of this mediation. The articulation of these two dialectics constituting our experience of embodiment can then ultimately be read as a dialectic of structure and event whose ethical and ontological character is at the heart of Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

One of principal tasks of Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting is to analyze the phenomenon of social cohesion, understood not as a uniform bond, but in terms of human plurality that arises from a diversity of perspectives of remembering groups rooted in complex stratifications and concatenations. This paper focuses on the role of remembrance and of its historical inscription as a source of social cohesion, which is subject to rupture and dissolution over time. It first identifies the way in which, (...) according to Ricœur, memory and history function as essential preconditions of social cohesion; following this, it examines the significance and scope of temporal rupture and discontinuity to which this cohesion is subject. In examining Ricœur’s reflection on social cohesion and on the discontinuity to which it is subject over time, I aim to place his thought in a critical light in order to set in relief what I take to be an important aporia it encounters. (shrink)

This study arises from a question concerning the phenomenological approach to memory in Memory, History, Forgetting, namely, why does Ricœur, who is otherwise known a great thinker of narrativity, neglects to consider the narrative aspect of memory? After explaining this surprising omission, we try to piece together, from hints and suggestions scattered throughout Ricœur’s work, a hermeneutical phenomenology more compatible with the narrative aspect of personal memory.

This article presents the conceptual groundwork for a “poetics of the self” by theorizing how and why a creative praxis rooted in Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will and hermeneutics of the living metaphor contributes to an individual’s on-going development of self-awareness. Its focus is on the affective fragility that manifests in an individual’s intermediary status of polarities – finitude and infinitude, freedom and nature – in conjunction with Ricœur’s tensional status of metaphorical truth. The act of writing poetry, it suggests, (...) can be an aesthetic mediation that develops insight into the primordial discord of the servile will. (shrink)

By following Ricoeur’s perspective, this article aims to show how the dialectic of vulnerability and effort constitutes the person’s emancipatory driving force. The author starts from a confrontation between Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricœur’s philosophies of the human being, deepening the various stages in order to reinterpret the initial idea that we are born an individual, whereas becoming a person is a process that goes through an interrelational and cultural dialectis. It is from this perspective, which more so than others (...) reveals a significant proximity between Ricœur and Levinas, that the idea of identity as a hermeneutical path of emancipation reveals its dimension of ethical challenge. That ethical challenge concerns, on the one hand, the relationship between passivity/vulnerability and subjective powers, and, on the other hand, the relationship between the capacity to be recognised by others and the will to progress with them through the challenges of mutual recognition. (shrink)

In Fallible man, Ricœur discovers a faille in the heart of man. Due to this faille, man is fragile: he has to mediate between himself and the world. This mediation puts man at risk of losing himself. Thus, fragile man is also fallible. In Oneself as Another, Ricœur returns to this faille that passes through the heart of the self, between idem and ipse, giving access to the alter. This image, the faille, guides Ricœur in each of these two texts. (...) It gives us access to their continuity but also to the gap that separates one from the other. But if this image has inspired Ricœur, it also gives us the opportunity to criticize his work. Re-reading the Symbolism of Evil, we will highlight a dimension of man little explored by Ricœur and that our current situation pushes us to rediscover: the body and gesture. (shrink)