Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Religion: A Constructive Interpretation and a Critical Assessment of His Recent Writings
Dissertation, University of Notre Dame (
1982)
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Abstract
My purpose is to present a constructive interpretation and a critical assessment of the recent writings of Paul Ricoeur which bear upon the philosophical investigation of religion. My thesis is that by gathering together his diverse studies of hermeneutics, of metaphor, and of Biblical exegesis, by ferreting out the critical moves at each level of inquiry, and by organizing the results in a systematic way, I can show an overall strategy for the philosophy of religion and spell out how Ricoeur's method can contribute significantly to the philosophical study of religion. This is a programmatic study and the chapters' titles indicate how the strategy proceeds. The first move is to begin with the canonical texts of a believing community and to bracket the derived and subordinated discourse of dogma and theology. The rest of the strategy takes us through a series of concentric circles. The largest circle considers all written texts and their interpretations. A smaller circle considers "poetic" texts and the metaphorical uses of language. The innermost circle considers the diverse texts that together make up the Christian canon of scripture which is the Bible. The work of criticism and evaluation is reserved, for the most part, to the final chapter, where I also indicate how Ricoeur's strategy can be extended to accomodate the study of religious phenomena which are non-Biblical and/or non-Christian