Paul Ricœur, with Rawls, Walzer, and Habermas as some of his main interlocuters, has developed a substantial and distinctive body of political thought. On the one hand, it articulates a rich conception of the paradoxical character of the domain of politics. On the other, it provides a fresh approach to such major topics as the relationship among politics, economics, and ethics and between concern for universal human rights and respect for cultural plurality. His work, rooted as it is in (...) Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, also provides resources for a fruitful rethinking of the issues at stake in the liberal-communitarian debate. (shrink)

The paper deals with the philosophical anthropology of one of the most important French philosophers, which, starting as a personalist, became devoted to phenomenology and finally became a representative of hermeneutics. Accepting the thesis, according to which philosophies of man as well as all human sciences are reductionist, he asks, whether the hermeneutic philosophy itself is not inclined to such reduction. He comes to the conclusion, that the hermeneutic philosophy of man as a speaking, acting and responsible animal is still (...) positivist-reductionist, regardless to its universality, complexity and originality. The evidence of it are the limits of communication. Appealing to ideal values, such as justice, truth and freedom, which are the basis of a person as the source of an inexhaustible meaning, thus becomes valid. (shrink)

In an intentionally provocative essay published in the journal Esprit (January, 1983) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, I ventured the following slogan: “Death to personalism; long live the person!” I was attempting to suggest that Mounier's formulation of personalism was, as he himself readily admitted, connected with a certain cultural and philosophical constellation which is no longer ours today: existentialism and Marxism are no longer the only opponents. They are no longer even opponents at all, against which personalism (...) would be required to define itself, at the risk of becoming one or another system or `ism'. I concluded my essay with the following citation from Mounier's Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme?: “We are witnessing [...] the first meanderings of a cyclical course where the explorations pursued to exhaustion along one path are are given up only to be rediscovered farther on, enriched by this forgetting and by the discoveries for which it cleared a path” (p. 11). In addition, I wanted to say that the person is still the most appropriate term to designate those investigations for which neither the term `con-sciousness', nor `subject', nor `individual' really apply, for the various reasons that I invoked at the time. I would like to discuss some of those investigations here, beyond the point reached in that essay, where I restricted myself to defining the person by an attitude in Eric Weil's sense, or as one would say in hermeneutics, by the everyday understanding that we have of it. Following Paul Landsberg, I used the criteria of crisis and commitment, adding to the latter certain corollaries such as fidelity over time to a higher cause, and acceptance of alterity and difference within personal identity. Now I would like to make use of contemporary investigations into language, action and narrative in order to provide the ethical constitution of the person with a substratum and roots, comparable to those explored by Emmanuel Mounier in Traité du Caractère. In this sense, the present study is an extension of Mounier's book. (shrink)

En este trabajo queremos mostrar la productividad ética y reflexiva del cine. El cine nos da una gran cantidad de posibilidades para ejercer la deliberación, uno de los métodos más relevantes de la ética. Para fundamentar este encuentro contamos con una poderosa tradición de pensamiento contemporánea, que nos ofrece intuiciones y herramientas muy valiosas: la fenomenología hermenéutica. En concreto, nos centraremos en dos de sus representantes, J. Marías y P. Ricoeur.

Procura-‑se compreender com este artigo os motivos da hermenêutica do testemunho em P. Ricoeur. Tentamos mostrar como esta categoria, de cariz eminentemente ético, é importante numa reflexão sobre o existir que não parte já da pura espontaneidade do cogito, mas da necessidade de uma reflexão mediata sobre a condição humana, isto é, sobre as suas ações, decisões e modos de estar-‑no-‑mundo. Não há para o filósofo qualquer compreensão que o sujeito possa ter de si mesmo que não esteja mediada por (...) signos, símbolos e textos. Daqui o valor ético de uma recuperação hermenêutica do testemunho, da história e do tesouro dos grandes símbolos das várias culturas que nos influenciaram. É a dialética da atestação pessoal de capacidades, no exercício do testemunho, e a dimensão hermenêutica e mesmo metafórica deste que preservam o âmbito histórico e ético da memória e da abertura ao que historicamente ficou por realizar e permanece em aberto, ao nível do absoluto ético desejável. (shrink)

It is common today to find in philosophical and scientific works the idea of agent causation dismissed as unintelligible. This article is meant to challenge that view. It argues that the conception of agent causation that Paul Ricoeur has defended is by no means unintelligible. Indeed there are compelling, even if not definitive, reasons for acknowledging the existence of such causation. The point of departure for this argument is Ricoeur’s reflection on the discursive character of human existence. To make my (...) case, I focus on the discursive practice of offering and receiving recommendations. This sort of practice is integral to important areas of human activity, including scientific activity. Though it is often overlooked, agent causation is a necessary precondition for the intelligibility of this practice. I acknowledge that just how agent causation comes to be in the course of the biological evolution of human beings is ontologically enigmatic. Nonetheless, the evidence in its favor is not only intelligible but is too robust to be dismissed merely on the grounds that it is ontologically ‘inconvenient’. (shrink)