Starting point of this article is a tension perceived in postsecular reassessments of religion between a new openness to religion’s meaning and importance and a negative motivation, due to religion’s violent presence. These negative conditions may hinder assessing religion in its fullness and specific character. Further reflection on the right attitude to study religion and a way out of this tension is given by analyzing Paul Ricoeur philosophical approach to religion in The Symbolism of Evil. A detailed investigation of Ricoeur’s (...) text is necessary to find out why he, as a philosopher, turns to religious language for reflecting on what he calls ‘the reality of evil’. The outcome of this study provides a critical perspective for discussing current reassessments of religion, as well as recent debates on the use of the concept of evil. This discussion will focus on the importance of approaching religion as dealing with fundamental existential questions, including when the topic of evil is concerned. Such a deliberate and positive approach to religion does not exclude criticism. A constructive approach to religion like Ricoeur’s seems necessary to really make sense of the ‘postsecular’ perspective as bridging the gap between religious and secular approaches. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue of Human Studies on postphenomenology outlines specific developments which have led to this style of phenomenology. Postphenomenology adapts aspects of pragmatism, including its anti-Cartesian program against early modern subject/object epistemology. Postphenomenology retains and emphasizes the use of phenomenological variations as an analytic tool, and in practice postphenomenology takes what is commonly now called “an empirical turn,” which deeply analyzes case studies or concrete issues under its purview.

This paper, originally given in Groningen, the Netherlands, proposed a ‘material hermeneutics’, or, metaphorically, an interpretation which “lets things speak” via new scientific imaging technologies. Such a material hermeneutics would add to, perhaps often displace the usual linguistictextual hermeneutics so refined by Paul Ricoeur. I outline several examples of such a hermeneutics here based on some 40 or more years of technoscience experience.

In this article, I examine the discourse around evil from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. Through an analysis of the religious symbolism of evil and an associated quest for a complete study of being, I intend in this article to explore fresh ways of establishing the relation between our rhetorical practices of evil and moral responsibility. I draw on Ricoeur’s work on the primary symbols of evil, which can be seen as a means for clarifying and extending our understanding of (...) evil and moral responsibility. I employ the concept of “the double intentionality of symbol” to advance an expressive-performative model of speaking about the full shape of moral responsibility. At stake in my paper is the possibility of recognizing the need to valorise subordinate resources of knowledge that might prevent us from studying and responding to the elusive reality of evil in intellectual abstraction. (shrink)

According to Husserlian scholars such as Mohanty, description and interpretation coexist within Husserl’s work and are envisioned as complementary rather than mutually exclusive approaches to inquiry. This paper argues that exploring the implications of this philosophical complementarity for psychological research would require distinguishing between both the multiple meanings of “interpretation” and the differing modes of interpretation within qualitative data. Husserl’s model of passive and active intentionality and Ricoeur’s theory of narrativity are examined in order to explore their relevance for research. (...) It is argued that interview data can demonstrate both actively and passively intended dimensions, and that the psychological meaningfulness of this complexity points to the relevance of not only Husserl’s static analysis but also his genetic analysis. Likewise, it is argued that Ricoeur’s work on narrativity and narrative identity is invaluable in grasping ways in which narrative data is intrinsically self-interpretive, expresses self-identity, and is both situated within and responsive to the larger social horizon of the ineluctably relational interview context within which it is given. (shrink)

This thesis explores the ethical impact of literary narrative fictions on the reader. It does so by focusing mainly on the reading experience since one of the main claims of the thesis is that literary narrative fictions are co-products of the author and the reader. In that sense the aforementioned impact cannot be understood without taking into account the creative acts of the reader. The exploration is carried out by focusing on three scholars whose investigations on the problem of literary (...) experience can be read as complementary works. In the first chapter I descriptively lay out Roman Ingarden’s investigation on the ontological and structural character of the literary work of art along with his phenomenological inquiry into the cognition of this work. By examining his basic claims about the nature of the literary work of art and its cognition, I discuss the ontological incompleteness of these works which necessitates the active role of the reader in giving the work its final shape. In the second chapter I focus upon Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory. Iser’s theory goes parallel to Ingarden’s in the sense that they both accept the openness of the work to the creative acts of the reader. Iser, however by his notions of depragmatization, negation and negativity suggest us a two-way traffic between the fictional work and the reader. Through the reading proses, by virtue of the negations and de-pragmatizations, the work invites the reader to reflect on the familiar norms it represents and suggest to her a new model to understand the real world. In this way, while giving a shape to the work, the reader is also shaped by it. The third chapter addresses the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. By exploring his notion of “narrative identity” as a mediator between the ipse and idem identities, my aim is to show the influence of the literary fictional narratives in understanding the identity of the individual subject as a temporal, historical, and intersubjective being. It is only through this understanding that we can construe the subject in her ethical identity. I will also focus on Ricoeur’s notions of “emplotment,” and “threefold mimesis,” which implies the active role of the reader in realizing the literary narrative fiction, so that I can reveal how fictional narratives enhance the notion of narrative identity. (shrink)

The following study is an attempt to ascertain the most adequate way to understand the relationship in modernity between religion and technology. This relationship is first analyzed by looking at a common way in which technology has been categorized and discussed as representing the religion of modernity. The first chapter critically evaluates several popular and scholarly works which contain arguments for understanding that the modern world participates in some kind of 'religion of technology.' The inadequacies of these arguments are shown (...) to arise from the problematic ways in which they invoke the meanings of both religion and technology. The suggestive possibility of viewing religion as a kind of technology leads to a consideration of how technology is being understood in the field of the philosophy of technology. (shrink)