Paul Ricoeur

The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language

Originally published in English in 1978, this full-scale examination of the philosophy of metaphor from Aristotle to the present, brings together and discusses significant viewpoints on metaphor held by writers in various disciplines. These include linguistics and semantics, the philosophy of language, literary criticism, and aesthetics.

The conflict of interpretations : essays in hermeneutics

This collection brings together twenty-two essays by Paul Ricoeur under the topics of structuralism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and religion. In dramatic conciseness, the essays illuminate the work of one of the leading philosophers of the day. Those interested in Ricoeurs development of the philosophy of language will find rich and suggestive reading. But the diversity of essays also speaks beyond the confines of philosophy to linguists, theologians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts.

Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator

That life has to do with narration has always been known and said; we speak of the story of a life to characterize the interval between birth and death. And yet this assimilation of a life to a history should not be automatic; it is a commonplace that should first be subjected to critical doubt. Such doubt is the outcome of all the knowledge acquired in the past few decades concerning the narrative and the narrating activity - knowledge that seems to remove the story from life as lived and locks it away in the realm of fiction.

Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation

The question of revelation is a formidable question in the proper sense of the word, not only because it may be seen as the first and last question for faith, but also because it has been obscured by so many false debates that the recovery of a real question in itself constitutes an enormous task. My lecture today will be devoted to just this enterprise.

Imagination in Discourse and in Action

The question considered in this essay can be stated in the following terms: Can the conception of imagination, first set out in the context of a theory of metaphor centered around the notion of semantic innovation, be expanded outside the sphere of discourse to which it originally belonged?

History and Hermeneutics

In this paper, I shall attempt to promote a reciprocity of arguments between philosophical hermeneutics and the method of historical inquiry. In the case of philosophical hermeneutics — on which I am focusing the discussion here — this concern for hearing arguments presented by the other side is not a frequent occurrence. Hermeneutics is better prepared to take the “way upward,” the path of the Ruckfrage which carries it from the historical inquiry of historians towards the consideration of the historicity of human experience in general. The “way downward” towards historical inquiry is a path less known to it. Yet it is on this path that we encounter the most significant questions for hermeneutics itself. The dialectic of the “way upward,” Plato has taught us, is arduous. But how much more so is this “second navigation!”

Can there be a Scientific Concept of Ideology

In this paper I will attempt to elaborate what I would like to call a phenomenology of ideology. Why a phenomenology? Because the expression “ideology” suffers from both misuse and abuse when it occurs in a polemical framework. Only a rigorous semantics controlled by an accurate description of the situations in which this expression is relevant could put an end to this abuse; such would be the approach which I call phenomenology. (I could also say a semantical phenomenology, but it is enough to say phenomenology, since the delineation of such a phenomenon has necessarily a linguistic dimension.)

Philosophy and Religious Language

The first assumption is that, for a philosophical inquiry, a religious faith may be identified through its language, or, to speak more accurately, as a kind of discourse. This first contention does not say that language, that linguistic expression, is the only dimension of the religious phenomenon; nothing is said-either pro or con-concerning the controversial notion of religious experience, whether we understand experience in a cognitive, a practical, or an emotional sense. What is said is only this: whatever ultimately may be the nature of the so-called religious experience, it comes to language, it is articulated in a language, and the most appropriate place to interpret it on its own terms is to inquire into its linguistic expression. The second assumption is that this kind of discourse is not senseless, that it is worthwhile to analyze it, because something is said that is not said by other kinds of discourse-ordinary, scientific, or poetic, or, to put into more positive terms, that it is meaningful at least for the community of faith which uses it either for the sake of self-understanding or for the sake of communication with others exterior to the faith community. My third presupposition is that philosophy is implied in this inquiry because this kind of discourse does not merely claim to be meaningful, but also to be true. This claim must be understood on its own terms. It implies that we do not yet recognize the truth value of this kind of

the human being as the subject matter of philosophy

disputable feature of our humanity is the use of language articulated as discourse. In this way, the philosophical discourse arises within the space of reflexivity opened up by the various discourses that we use about the world, ourselves and other people. But this mediation provided by the reflexivity of discourse in general between philosophy and its topic, when this topic is the human being, does not imply that philosophical discourse should proceed in a direct, immediate, and intuitive way from this spontaneous reflexivity. With Kant, I assume that the question: What is a human?, far from constituting the first question that philosophy is able to raise, comes at the end of a series of prior questions such as: What can I know? What must I do? What am

Greimas's Narrative Grammar

WHAT IS INTERESTING about Greimass narrative grammar is the way it constructs, degree by degree, the necessary conditions for narrativity, starting from a logical model which is the least complex possible and which, initially, includes no chronological import at all. The question is whether, in the attempt to arrive at the structure of those stories which are in fact produced by oral and written traditions, the author, in the successive additions with which he enriches his initial model, does indeed build upon the specifically narrative characteristics of the initial model or whether his development includes extrinsic presuppositions. Greimas believes that despite these additions to the initial model, an equivalence is maintained, from beginning to end, between that initial model and the final matrix. The validity of this belief must be tested theoretically and practically. Here this will be done at the theoretical level, that is, by following the author step by step as he constructs his final model, without including examples which might verify a posteriori the fruitfulness of the method.