The purpose of this study is to propose the structural outline and conceptual framework of a Ricœurian translation theory. Following a discussion on the ambiguities around situating Ricœur in translation theory, three major interlinked components of the theory are explored. First, the metaphysics of meaning and translation is established based on Ricœur’s hermeneutics of infinitude. Then, the language-processing component is constructed through an incorporation of Ricœur’s narrative theory. Finally, the ethics and politics of translation, particularly in globalization, are founded based (...) on Ricœur’s “age of hermeneutics theory.”. (shrink)
Although Paul Ricœur never wrote a book on acting and suffering, the essay focuses on Ricœur’s engagement with this topic. It was one of Ricœur’s abiding interests that consistently appeared over the years in a number of his works. Given his compassionate affirmation of life in this world, he was vitally concerned about human beings’ inhumanity, in the form of inflicting unmerited suffering on their fellow beings. His distress on this issue was clearly evident. This essay is an overview of (...) Ricœur’s endeavors to try and alleviate such injustice by a commitment to an ethically grounded approach that aimed at “the good life with and for others, in just institutions.”. (shrink)
In Oneself as Another, Ricœur famously writes of the ethical intention as “aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.” This article explores the potential meaning of “just institutions,” a theme underdeveloped in Ricœur’s work. While many have argued that institutions necessarily reify and so cannot aim toward just ends, the article draws on Ricœur’s differentiation between objectification and reification to show why this need not be the case. While reification destroys human value and meaning because (...) it reduces human activity to a thing, objectification characterizes the positive externalization of ourselves in objects—in words, deeds, structures, and institutions. Institutions such as the law are structures that can positively objectify our just aspirations, even if we must continually guard against these structures’ reified reduction. Ricœur shows us how objectification, including objectification of values in institutions, can be something not only positive but necessary in order for values to flourish. (shrink)
In this anti-colonial treatise, Ricœur reflects on the responsibility of every French citizen and of the French state with respect to colonialism. He establishes five principles that should guide his readers in their reflection on this issue and expresses his support for the independence of the colonies.
In this essay, Domenico Jervolino summarizes twenty years of Ricoeur’s reading of Patočka’s work, up to the Neapolitan conference of 1997. Nowhere is Ricoeur closer to Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology. Both thinkers belong, together with authors like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, to a third phase of the phenomenological movement, marked by the search for a new approach to the relation between human beings and world, beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In the search for this approach, Patočka strongly underlines the relation between body, temporality (...) and sociality. Central to this new encounter of Patočka and Ricoeur is the discovery of an idea of inter-human community based on a a-subjective conception of existence. (shrink)
This article situates The Course of Recognition in the context of Ricœurian philosophy and contemporary debates on mutual recognition. This article reconstructs the debate between Ricœur and mainstream recognition scholars, as well as with the other figures, such as Boltanski, Thévenot and Hénaff, who had a direct influence in the way Ricœur fleshed out his alternative conception of recognition. By connecting recognition with Ricœur’s notions of ideology and utopia, we are able to uncover a major blind spot in the standard (...) model of recognition,and to undo ideological and reified forms of recognition. Honneth and Ricœur both aim at societies whose members are duly recognized, but they do so in radically different manners. Whereas Honneth’s model must be politicized in order to become relevant to social change, Ricœur evisages social change in a pure ethics of recognition. (shrink)
English-language translation of a major work by French philosopher Eric Alliez, in which he offers a new perspective on critical problems in modern aesthetics.
Résumé Le but de cet article est de mettre en dialogue Ricœur avec la théorie sociale d’Anthony Giddens, plus spécifiquement l’herméneutique de l’homme capable avec la théorie de la structuration. Nous commencerons par explorer quelques termes clefs permettant de comparer les deux auteurs au sujet du rapport entre acteurs et systèmes. Chez Ricœur, nous commenterons les notions d’institution et de pratique; chez Giddens, des notions importantes pour présenter la “dualité de structure.” Au cours de cette exploration, quatre tâches seront identifiées (...) en vue de préciser la “théorie sociale” de Soi-même comme un autre : dépasser le schéma foncièrement téléologique de l’action; explorer la stabilisation de l’action malgré l’incertitude inscrite dans le schéma téléologique; réinvestir la notion de contrainte; et clarifier l’ambiguïté de la notion d’institution. En conclusion, nous montrerons quels apports la mise en dialogue de Ricœur avec Giddens pourrait offrir pour accomplir ces quatre tâches. Mots-clés : Homme capable, sructuration, acteur, dualité de structure, institution, contrainte.The aim of this article is to reconstruct a dialogue between Ricœur and Anthony Giddens, in particular between the hermeneutics of the capable human and the theory of structuration. The article starts with an exploration of key concepts on the basis of which to compare the two authors on the relation between actors and systems. On Ricœur’s side the concepts of institution and practice will be commented on; on Giddens’ side notions selected to present the “duality of structure” will be considered. In the course of this exploration, four tasks will be identified by which to refine the “social theory” of Oneself as Another : surpass its ultimately teleological schema of action; explore the stabilisation of action despite the uncertainty attributed to the teleological schema; reinvest the notion of constraint; and clarify the ambiguity in the notion of institution. In conclusion the contribution of a Ricœur-Giddens dialogue to the accomplishment of these four tasks will be demonstrated. Keywords: Capable Man, Structuration, Actor, Duality of structure, Institution, Constraint. (shrink)
In this paper I consider Ricœur’s negotiation of the boundary or relationship between philosophy and religion in light of the larger debate in contemporary French philosophy. I suggest that contrasting his way of dealing with the intersection of the two discourses to that of two other French thinkers (Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry) illuminates his stance more fully. I begin with a brief outline of Ricœur’s claims about the distinction or relation between the discourses, then reflect on those of Marion (...) and Henry, who although they do not relate them in the same way still together form a significant contrast to Ricœur’s perspective, and conclude with a fuller consideration of Ricœur’s methodology in light of this comparison. I suggest that it is in particular his hermeneutic commitments that lead him both to more rigorous distinctions between discourses and ironically to greater mediation. (shrink)
Ricoeur’s Philosophy of the Will is reexamined here both as a source of motivation for his project of dialoguing with the analytic theory of action and as an explanation for the lack of response on the part of his Anglo-American interlocutors. Keywords: Actions, Language, Body, Idealism. Résumé La Philosophie de la volonté de Ricœur est revisitée ici comme source de motivation de son entreprise de dialogue avec la théorie analytique de l’action et comme explication du défaut de réponse de ses (...) interlocuteurs anglo-américains. Mots-clés: Actions, Langage, Corps, Idéalisme. (shrink)
Offers a history of the philosophy of time and a comparison of the ways of conceiving the temporal, concentrating on European philosophy and its impact the connection between time and money in Western civilization.
This major volume assembles leading scholars to address and explain the significance of Paul Ricoeur's extraordinary body of work. Ricoeur's work is of seminal importance to the development of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and ideology critique in the human sciences. Opening with three key essays from Ricoeur himself--on Europe, fragility and responsibility, and love and justice--this fascinating volume offers a tour of his work ranging across topics such as the hermeneutics of action, narrative force, and the other and deconstruction, while discussing his (...) work in the context of such contemporary thinkers as Heidegger, Levinas, Arendt, and Gadamer. Offering a very useful overview of Paul Ricoeur's enormous contribution to modern thought, Paul Ricoeur will be invaluable for students and academics across the social and human sciences and philosophy. (shrink)
Paul Ricoeur's Search for a New Foundation of Human Rights and Dignity by Means of the Capabilities and his Application of phronesis The aim of the following article is to reconstruct Paul Ricoeur's concepts of human rights and human dignity by exploring some little-known texts, and to exemplify how these concepts are connected to a specific philosophical conception of human being, which is grounded in a Dialectics between transcendence and incarnation, freedom and dependence, identity and difference, capability and fallibility. In (...) doing so, I will argue that Ricœur interprets human dignity, which he has never explicitly defined, through the prism of human capabilities, especially of the capability of being responsible. This interpretation allows him to take a differentiated position in the current bioethical debates on the rights of "potential persons" and to illustrate how the Aristotelian phronèsis can be used in ethical cases where decisions are difficult to take. (shrink)
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE In what sense is the self, as Ricœur conceives it, a vulnerable self? We shall argue that vulnerability, as far as it concerns the self, can be approached on three levels: reflexive, of human abilities and ontological. However, if Ricœur helps us think human fragility and thus define a new concept of self, vulnerability remains understood in the framework of a reflection on human acting of which it is, in a certain way, (...) the negative. Autonomy, as the culminating point of acting, remains the ultimate goal. For us, approaching vulnerability from such a reference point ought to be put into question: does it enable us to really determine what vulnerability is? In order to answer this question, we will confront Ricœur’s conception of vulnerability with levinasian ethics. Indeed, Levinas operates a double reversal: not only does vulnerability come first, but in addition, vulnerability is of the other before being of the self. Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE. (shrink)
Ricœur’s philosophy never locates itself directly in the field of philosophical aesthetics inasmuch as philosophical aesthetics never arises as a field of major questioning and discursive development for Ricœur’s philosophy or as a field that would guide that philosophy. However, Ricœur maintains an ongoing but complex connection with aesthetics throughout his philosophical work. Here we defend the thesis that there are difficulties relating both to the complexity of Ricœur’s philosophy and to the crisis situation of aesthetics as an autonomous field (...) of philosophical inquiry. A more direct confrontation with philosophical aesthetics, such as that developed by analytic philosophy and critical theory today, is necessary in order to be aware of this connection between Ricœur’s philosophy and aesthetics. It then appears that if Ricœur’s philosophy makes it possible to maintain a certain autonomy of the field of aesthetics inherited from Kant, it is not through developing some unlikely “Ricœurian aesthetic” but thanks to a Ricœurian philosophy of aesthetics essentially determined on three levels: 1) the connection between poetics and aesthetics within a philosophy of imagination, 2) the connection between criticism and hermeneutics with regard the notions of text and distanciation, 3) the connection between ontology and communication that summarizes the two previous steps by combining phenomenological, analytic and critical perspectives. Thus it can be assumed that this autonomy of the field of aesthetics is possible only at a horizon of meaning determined by Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology: at the axiological level, the field of aesthetics differs upstream from the field of poetics and downstream from the field of ethics; at the ontological level, Ricœur’s philosophy of aesthetics concerns a region that is both intermediate between and congruent to those treated by Ricœur’s philosophy of imagination and by Ricœur’s philosophy of action. (shrink)
Unable to reconcile freedom of choice and the inexorable limitations of nature, common sense successively affirms a false unlimited and unsituated freedom, and a false determination of man by nature which reduces him to an object. On the ...
This is a collection in translation of essays by Paul Ricoeur which presents a comprehensive view of his philosophical hermeneutics, its relation to the views of his predecessors in the tradition and its consequences for the social sciences. The volume has three parts. The studies in the first part examine the history of hermeneutics, its central themes and the outstanding issues it has to confront. In Part II, Ricoeur's own current, constructive position is developed. A concept of the text is (...) formulated as the implications of the theory are pursued into the domains of sociology, psychoanalysis and history. Many of the essays appear here in English for the first time; the editor's introduction brings out their background in Ricoeur's thought and the continuity of his concerns. The volume will be of great importance for those interested in hermeneutics and Ricoeur's contribution to it, and will demonstrate how much his approach offers to a number of disciplines. (shrink)
Cette étude se propose de confronter deux conceptions du passé qui se font jour en alternance dans la pensée de Paul Ricœur. La première, que l’on rencontre dans Temps et récit et ailleurs, appréhende le passé comme un espace d’expérience riche de possibilités dont la saisie au présent permet d’orienter les attentes dirigées vers l’avenir; la seconde, reprise de la psychanalyse freudienne, le pose comme une charge qui hante le présent sur le mode de la compulsion de répétition. Les enjeux (...) de cette confrontation entre un passé qui ouvre sur l’avenir et un qui en barre l’accès sont doubles: d’un côté il s’agit de montrer quelles incidences les lectures de Freud faites par Ricœur ont eu sur sa propre philosophie du temps; de l’autre, d’exposer, à la lumière du problème posé par la hantise du passé, toute la portée pratique de l’idée ricœurienne d’un passé indéterminé. (shrink)
Recent decades have seen a significant increase in physicians participating in international short-term missions to regions with limited or no access to health care by virtue of natural disaster or lack of resources. Recent publications in the ethics literature have explored the potential of these missions for unintentional harm to the intended beneficiaries. Less has been discussed about how to respond when harm actually occurs. The authors review the ethical issues raised by short-term medical and humanitarian missions and the literature (...) on responding to unintended error to provide guidelines for avoiding harm to the intended beneficiaries of missions and an appropriate response when harm occurs. Two cases demonstrating an analysis and response to unintended harm are presented. (shrink)
Deux ans après le décès du philosophe fut publié en 2007, son dernier livre inachevé, Vivant jusqu'à la mort, venant clore une oeuvre riche et variée, dans laquelle un fil conducteur se fait jour : le thème de la capacité et la philosophie de l'action qui prennent le pas sur la faillibilité. Plusieurs philosophes présentent cette thématique de l'homme capable, leurs études abordent sous des angles variés, la question du soi éthique et de son rapport à l'autre, du soi politique (...) et de l'identité collective, du soi herméneutique et du soi langagier, un être capable de dépasser les ruptures entre les langues et les cultures. Ils nous montrent l'originalité de la pensée de Ricoeur. (shrink)
Il est désormais connu que Michel Foucault s’est intéressé à la fin de sa vie à l’ ”herméneutique du sujet.” Mais cette histoire de la constitution du sujet (ou de la subjectivité) fait étrangement l’économie d’une réflexion sur le rôle de la compréhension, alors que Foucault qualifie son travail d’ ”ontologie historique de nous-mêmes.” C'est sur ce point précis qu’est ici mis à l'épreuve le caractère médiateur de l’œuvre de Paul Ricœur, dont l’herméneutique du soi prend en charge une ontologie (...) de la compréhension. Suite à ces considérations, la seconde partie de l’article cherche à démontrer que la théorie de l’agir de Ricœur peut favoriser le passage d’une reconnaissance de type objectale à une reconnaissance des capacités du sujet à se tenir pour responsable. Ce passage sera opéré directement sur le modèle d’analyse du “dernier Foucault,” c’est-à-dire son concept-clé de “processus de subjectivation.” In his later work, Michel Foucault manifested a strong interest for the “hermeneutics of the subject.” Yet this history of the constitution of the subject (or subjectivity) does without any reflection on the role of understanding, even though Foucault characterizes his project as a historical ontology of ourselves . The power of mediation emphasized in the work of Paul Ricœur may help us redefine an ontology of understanding through a hermeneutics of the self. Following this, the second part of the article aims to show that Ricœur’s theory of action can facilitate a transition from the recognition of the self, first described as “objectivation,” to a recognition of the subject’s capacity to be held responsible. This passage will draw on the model of analysis in the later Foucault, specifically, on his key concept of the subjectivation process . . (shrink)
In this article, the diagram is used to chart the movement from Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and engagement with structuralism in the 1960s to Deleuze and Guattari's ethico-aesthetic constructivism of the 1970s and 1980s. This is shown to culminate in a biopolitical critique and decoding of philosophy, which is part of the unfolding of a transdisciplinary research programme where art is seen to come ontologically ahead of philosophy.
Within the continuation of the controversy provoked by Alain Badiou’s Deleuze , the article proposes a reading of Saint Paul. The foundation of universalism which follows engages in exploring the political basement of the conflict between the two paradigms of the multiple developed respectively in the philosophies of Deleuze and Badiou. Saint Paul - or the universalism of grace against the materialism of life.
Les commentateurs s’accordent pour constater une évolution dans la pensée politique de Ricœur conduisant d’un radicalisme à un réformisme. Par-delà ces variations, on se propose plutôt de mettre en évidence la continuité d’un projet. Non seulement la critique du capitalisme se poursuit jusqu’au bout, mais la perspective du socialisme semble très tôt tenue pour improbable. Dans les deux cas, la préoccupation centrale porte sur la nécessité de raviver les traditions et de faire émerger l’élan initial sous la doctrine “ossifiée ” (...) en les situant en tension critique entre elles pour qu’elles se corrigent mutuellement. Le projet politique de Ricœur consiste à établir en vis-à-vis libéralisme et socialisme. (shrink)
If we begin to sense that Deleuze will have been the first to recognize Gabriel Tarde as a kind of «precursor » which he explored in his most untimely actuality, the constitutive character of Tarde’s inspiration for Deleuze has not been closely studied. It seems, however, as if Deleuze’s critique and overcoming of structuralist thought depends upon this reactualisation of Tarde’s work. This will allow us to better understand the extended »forgetting » of’ Tarde, buried for so long under the (...) Durkheimian structural model which has dominated the social and human sciences. (shrink)
