By Morny Joy

Paul Ricoeur, who identified himself primarily as a hermeneutic phenomenologist, was animated by both a sense of wonder and irrepressible curiosity as he undertook diverse explorations of the meaning and purpose of human existence. Ricoeur appreciated that this task was one of interpretation. Initially this involved an examination of myths and symbols, though in time he came to regard the interpretation of texts as more important. An early catch phrase was: “The symbol gives rise to thought.” His famous subsequent detours into narrative and history helped him to clarify the conditions that both support and hinder human beings’ quest to attain a sense of self or identity. In all of these undertakings, Ricoeur did not think that a conflict of interpretations was necessarily a problem to be overcome, but that it witnessed to the richness of human thinking in a variety of disciplines that employed different approaches. Yet he was not a relativist, believing that there are certain standards of judgment that are available to evaluate proposed interpretations. At the same time, he refused to be dogmatic in his pronouncements. Dialogue and mediation marked his preferred approach and he was both generous and magnanimous in his interrogations of other scholars’ works, always striving to “think more” and reach further constructive insights, rather than pronounce any definitive resolutions. He remarked of his dialectical approach:

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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.