Ricoeur speaks to the unfolding ‘post-crisis’ period of the academic humanities through his dialectic between the hermeneutics of faith and suspicion, a construct that carries forward the critical impulse which academic bureaucracies want to repress in answer to their corporate masters, while at the same recognizing the value of reformist impulses that will generate strategic alignments and substantive benefits. This article identifies the tensions of the double hermeneutic, where it is successful and unsuccessful, and maps Ricoeur’s view of ethical responsibility (...) in the academic politics of the 1960s onto the academic politics of today. The article concludes that Ricoeur’s particular value on this subject lies in the courage with which he dared to place unfashionable reformist possibilities in an honest and productive dialogue with the radical suspicion of hegemonic structures. (shrink)

This paper undertakes to reconstruct the idea of Europe in the writings of Jan Patočka and Paul Ricœur alongside those of their common inspiration, Husserl. In doing so, it shows that one of the main originalities of this standpoint is to characterize Europe’s crisis as being a spiritual crisis, and its potential overcoming as being rooted in a specific attitude. With this ideal description in mind, the paper proceeds to descriptively assess the present day political situation in the European Union (...) and the several challenges it faces, from the deep divisions between debtors and creditors following the 2008–2009 sovereign debt crisis, to the possibility of unraveling initiated by the Brexit process and the so-called populist threat lingering in different countries. Finally, it contends, following some insights by Patočka, Ricœur and Richard Kearney, that in order to avoid the decay or even death of the E.U. a rekindling of Europe’s ideal is needed, one that is not based in a de facto dominance of some countries over others, or even in a totally homogenous and all-imposing narrative, but rather on mutual understanding through the sharing of stories that can perhaps refocus Europe’s different peoples towards the reconstruction of common goals. (shrink)

Several Paul Ricœur’s texts of the 1970s and 1980s mention so-called “founding events”, “events-signs”, “events of deliverance”, “acts of liberation” or “great events of salvation”. As examples of such events, Ricœur mentions two episodes from the Holy Scriptures, the Exodus and the Resurrection. However, their religious specificity is not essential. Their meaning concerns the philosopher inasmuch as they are received by posterity, through a secular process of active hermeneutics, of interpretation by acts. The founding events generate sense by two ways, (...) as narratives and as symbols. As narratives, they consist of intentional acts produced by human or divine persons; as symbols they form essential totalities which belong to nobody and are subjected to incessant interpretation. They imply a rupture with the past and the beginning of a new epoch. In modern political history, their role is played by revolutions, endowed with a greater “interpretability” than other founding events and may be compared only to some military victories. Two forms of subjectivity correspond to these two ways of sense-making: a narrative subjectivity, which is temporal and retrospective and a symbolic subjectivity, tending either to the timelessness of abstract concepts or to the immersion into the immediate actuality of lived experience. (shrink)