Continental Philosophy

Charles Reagan reviews Paul Ricoeur’s last book, Living up to Death

This is a strange book requiring a strange review. It is the publication of some of Paul Ricoeur’s previously unpublished writing, which he himself did not intend to publish. The first part of the book comes from notes he made in 1995-96 on the topic of death. After they were written, they were left in a folder and he never returned to them again. In the second part of the book are some of the “fragments” he wrote during his last days, mostly brief reflections on topics which preoccupied him such as life and death, Christianity, his faith and his philosophy, the Bible, his friend Jacques Derrida and resurrection. There is a Preface by Olivier Abel, a long-time friend of Ricoeur’s and a Postface by Catherine Goldenstein, also a very close friend for his last ten years.

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Lucid and rigorous in equal measure, Watkin’s Phenomenology and Deconstruction is both a timely intervention and a critical introduction to a vital current in contemporary European thought. It is also an essential reconfiguration of the intellectual landscape as concerns phenomenology, giving us back the bodies we need, but stranger and richer. –Prof. Patrick ffrench, Department of French, King’s College, London

Description
Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy. A constant dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s engagement with phenomenological themes provides the impetus to establishing a new understanding of ‘being’ and ‘presence’ that exposes significant blindspots inherent in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction. In reproducing neither a stock phenomenological reaction to deconstruction nor the routine deconstructive reading of phenomenology, Christopher Watkin provides a fresh assessment of the possibilities for the future of phenomenology, along with a new reading of the deconstructive legacy. Through detailed studies of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur and Nancy, he shows how a phenomenological tradition much wider and richer than Husserlian or Heideggerean thought alone can take account of Derrida’s critique of ontology and yet still hold a commitment to the ontological.This new reading of being and presence fundamentally re-draws our understanding of the relation of deconstruction and phenomenology, and provides the first sustained discussion of the possibilities and problems for any future ‘deconstructive phenomenology’.

Christopher Watkin is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is currently working on atheism and the death of God in Nancy, Badiou, Zizek and Meillassoux.

Link

A review of Narrative Identity and Moral Identity: A Practical Perspective

Narrative conceptions of agency have attracted considerable philosophical interest in recent years, and both of these books make significant contributions to the growing literature on this theme. Each treats a wide range of related concepts, including not just narrative agency itself but also personal and practical identity, temporality and the self, practical reasoning, and autonomy.

Kim Atkins’ Narrative Identity and Moral Identity is a book about the nature of human selfhood. Atkins uses the terms “selfhood” and “identity” interchangeably, and approaches her subject in part through a discussion of theories of personal identity. Her central interest, however, is in practical rather than metaphysical identity. A person, in the sense of interest to Atkins, is a practical unity of first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives (more on this below), and questions about personal identity, in her sense, are questions about the continuity of this practical unity over time.

Rest of the review

Oxford Forum Public Conference — Ricoeur: On Memory, Politics and Forgiveness

20-21 March 2009, Faculty of Philosophy and Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford

Friday, 20 March, Faculty of Philosophy

14.00-15.15 Dialogue with Pamela Sue Anderson (Oxford)
On Confidence, Power and Affirmation

15.15-15.30 Break

15.30-16.45 Dialogue with Luc Bovens (LSE)
On Apologies and Forgiveness

16.45-17.15 Coffee/Tea

17.15-18.30 Dialogue with Morny Joy (Calgary)
On Solicitude and Gift

Saturday, 21 March, Regent’s Park College

11.30-12.45 Dialogue with David Klemm (Iowa-Glasgow)
On Reading Ricoeur (tbc)

13.00-14.15 Lunch (own arrangements)

14.15-15.30 Dialogue with William Schweiker (Chicago)
On Ricoeur and Theological Humanism (tbc)

15.30-16.00 Coffee/Tea

16.00-17.00 Round table
Chair: David Jasper (Glasgow)

The event is open to all and there are no registration fees. For further information and to book a place contact Roxana Baiasu, Roxana.Baiasu@philosophy.ox.acor Juliana Cardinale: 020 7955 7539, J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk
Forum for European Philosophy European Institute, London School of Economics, WC2A 2AE www.philosophy-forum.org

Phenomenology did not begin as a religious philosophy, but recently several prominent European phenomenologists have asked whether a coherent phenomenology of human experience must find its fulfillment in religion.

Christian phenomenologists such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Jean-Louis Chrétien have all pressed an incisive and provocative question to modern secular philosophy: do our lived human experiences of self, other and world finally make sense only when we see them as founded on God’s creative act? By answering this question affirmatively, these thinkers have asserted that a rigorous philosophical account of human experience must also involve a philosophy of God. Human experience, precisely in order to be true to itself, must include practices of religious gratitude and praise. As a corollary, philosophy must include theological analysis.

The Silverman Center’s 2009 Symposium on phenomenology and the theological turn will therefore investigate sympathetically and critically this radical turn to religion in phenomenology. We hope you will join us for what is sure to be a spirited conversation about a matter that is of far more than just theoretical interest.
Speakers

Jean-Luc Marion, University of Chicago and University of Paris-Sorbonne
“On the Foundation of the Distinction Between Theology and Philosophy”

Richard Kearney, Boston College
“Returning to God After God: Levinas, Derrida, Ricoeur”

Edith Wyschogrod, Rice University
“Confessional Memoirs: The Phenomenology of Telling It All”

Jay Lampert, University of Guelph
“Do the Arguments for Saturated Phenomena Prove That They Are Necessary or That They Are Possible? Time to Decide”

Link

TOC

The ego, the Other and the primal fact — Toru Tani

Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism — Dermot Moran

Some differences between Kant’s and Husserl’s conceptions of transcendental philosophy — Thomas J. Nenon

Heidegger in Mexico: Emilio Uranga’s ontological hermeneutics — Carlos Alberto Sanchez

A non-Bergsonian Bachelard — Jean François Perraudin

Laughing at finitude: Slavoj Žižek reads Being and Time — Thomas Brockelman

Ricoeur and the pre-political — Farhang Erfani and John F. Whitmire

Ricoeur, P. (1986 [1965]). Fallible Man. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press.

http://www.mediafire.com/?mmnl0nu5noj

(h/t: aadkenn)

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SOCIETY FOR RICOEUR STUDIES CONFERENCE

October 15-16, 2008

Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA

This conference will precede the conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) to be held in Pittsburgh October 16-18, 2008.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: June 30, 2008

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:

Papers addressing all aspects of Ricoeur’s work are welcome. For purposes of consideration, please submit an abstract only (of roughly 300-500 words) and attach a separate title page that includes the paper’s title, the author’s name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email address. Abstracts will be reviewed blind by a committee. Notification of acceptance will be given via email. Final papers should not exceed a length of 3000 words. Abstracts should be sent to: Professor Dan Stiver at dstiver@hsutx.edu.

KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy | ISSN 1908-7330

We are pleased to release the December 2007 Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy

Please click on the following links for:

The journal website
Current issue
Call for papers

KRITIKE VOLUME ONE NUMBER TWO (DECEMBER 2007)

1. Editorial: In this Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy
The Editor

Featured Essays:

2. Knowledge as Addiction: A Comparative Analysis — Hans-Georg Moeller

3. What is Hermeneutics? — Romualdo E. Abulad, SVD

Articles:

4. Dare to Compare: The Comparative Philosophy of Mou Zongsan — Xiaofei Tu

5. Students Feed Monkeys for Education: Using the Zhuangzi to Communicate in a Contemporary System of Education — Paul D’Ambrosio

6. The Indirect Perception of Distance: Interpretive Complexities in Berkeley’s Theory of Vision — Michael James Braund

7. The ‘Turn’ to Time and the Miscarriage of Being — Virgilio Aquino Rivas

8. The Role of Techne in the Authenticity-Inauthenticity Distinction — Kristina Lebedeva

9. The Philippine Church, State, and People on the Problem of Population — F. P. A. Demeterio

10. Metaphysics after Aquinas — Moses Aaron T. Angeles

11. Symbolism in Religion: Ricoeurian Hermeneutics and Filipino Philosophy of Religion — Allan Cacho

We are also inviting you to submit your work for consideration in the June 2008 issue of the journal. Please click the link for the guidelines. We will send an announcement regarding the submission due date shortly.

SOCIETY FOR RICOEUR STUDIES

ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2007

DePaul University

1 E. Jackson Blvd.  8^th Floor

Chicago, IL

 Wednesday, November 7, 2007

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SOCIETY FOR RICOEUR STUDIES CONFERENCE – November 7, 2007

DePaul University (Downtown campus), 1 East Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, IL.

This conference will precede the conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) to be held in Chicago November 8-10, 2007.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 1, 2007.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS: Papers addressing all aspects of Ricoeur’s work are welcome. For purposes of consideration, please submit an abstract only (of roughly 300-500 words) and attach a separate title page that includes the paper’s title, the author’s name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and email address. Abstracts will be reviewed blind by a committee. Notification of acceptance will be given via email. Final papers should not exceed a length of 3000 words. Abstracts should be sent to: Professor Dan Stiver at dstiver@hsutx.edu

Online Videos by Veoh.com

A review of Ricoeur's On Translation (Thinking in Action)

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who died in 2005 at the age of 92, was both the John Dewey and the Aristotle of post-World War II philosophy. Like Dewey, Ricoeur was a sweet-tempered and optimistic thinker who wrote important and original works well into his eighties. Like Aristotle, he sought to embrace the world as it is rather than chase after a unifying Truth or Being hiding elsewhere. Ricoeur — whose major works include Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation(1970), The Rule of Metaphor(1977), Time and Narrative(1984), and Memory, History, and Forgetting(2004) — wrote about everything from religion to the logic of the social sciences, working from within a hermeneutical framework that emphasized the complexity and multiplicities of this world and of the ways humans make sense of it.

The rest

(Via PTDR) 

TOC

A phenomenology of gender — Johanna Oksala

Betrayal in teaching: Persuasion in Kierkegaard, theory and performance — David A. Borman

Heidegger’s animals — Stuart Elden

Lacan’s subversion of the subject — Ed Pluth

Dialectic and dialogue in the hermeneutics of Paul Ricœur and H.G. Gadamer — Francisco J. Gonzalez

Here is an interview with Paul Ricoeur on Arts, Language and Hermeneutic Aesthetics.

Just a passage:

To return to Kant, it is striking to see that he was very severely at a loss to situate genius in relation to the beautiful and the sublime, because there always remains something of the retrospective in the judgment of taste, whereas the beautiful creates anew.  I am interested in this problem, either by way of  metaphor, or else from narrative, within the theme of semantic innovation.  In both cases, the idea emerges of a new meaning which had not been there.  Thus metaphor is the capacity to produce a new meaning, at the flash-point where a semantic incompatibility founders in the confrontation of several levels of signification, to produce a new signification which exists only in the breaking up of the semantic fields.  In the case of narrative, I would risk saying that what I call the synthesis of the heterogeneous does not create any less novelty than metaphor, but this time in the composition, in the configuration of a narrated temporality, of a narrative temporality.  To join together multiple events, causalities, finalities and contingencies, is to produce a new meaning which is the plot. Each plot is singular and  has exactly the status of the work of art according to Kant: the singularity capable of being shared. 

Thanks to Jim Ambury for the link.

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Here is the transcript.