Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon calls attention to the dynamic interaction that takes place between hermeneutics and phenomenology in Ricoeur’s thought. It could be said that Ricoeur’s thought is placed under a twofold demand: between the rigor of the text and the requirements of the phenomenon. The rigor of the text calls for fidelity to what the text actually says, while the requirement of the phenomenon is established by the Husserlian call to return “to the things themselves.” These two demands are interwoven insofar as there is a hermeneutic component of the phenomenological attempt to go beyond the surface of things to their deeper meaning, just as there is a phenomenological component of the hermeneutic attempt to establish a critical distance toward the world to which we belong. For this reason, Ricoeur’s thought involves a back and forth movement between the text and the phenomenon. Although this double movement was a theme of many of Ricoeur’s essays in the middle of his career, the essays in this book suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology remains implicit throughout his work. The chapters aim to highlight, in much greater detail, how this back and forth movement between phenomenology and hermeneutics takes place with respect to many important philosophical themes, including the experience of the body, history, language, memory, personal identity, and intersubjectivity.

John B. Thompson's collection of translated essays forms an illuminating introduction to Paul Ricoeur's prolific contributions to sociological theory.

Hermeneutic Phenomenology serves to introduce the philosophy of Paul Ricœur and give new perspectives to the philosophy of language.

Paul Ricoeur's work is of seminal importance to the development of hermeneutics, phenomenology and ideology critique in the human sciences. This major volume assembles leading scholars to address and explain the significance of this extraordinary body of work. Opening with three key essays from Ricoeur himself, the book offers a fascinating tour of his work ranging across topics such as the hermeneutics of action, narrative force, the other and deconstruction while discussing his work in the context of such contemporary figures as including Heidegger, L[ac]evinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Paul Ricoeur is also published as Volume 21 Issue 5/6 of Philosophy and Social Criticism.

Paul Ricoeur (1913-) is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences at the University of Paris X, Nanterre. One of the foremost contemporary French philosophers, his work is influenced by Husserl, Marcel and Jaspers and is particularly concerned with symbolism, the creation of meaning and the interpretation of texts. The Conflict of Interpretations ranges across an astonishing diversity of fields: structuralism, linguistics, psychoanalysis, religion and faith. The essays it comprises are bound together by Ricoeur's customary concern for interpretation and language and all bear the stamp of the systematic and critical thinking which has become his hallmark in contemporary philosophy. Edited by Don Ihde>

by Paul Ricoeur It is already a piece of good fortune to find oneself understood by a reader who is at once demanding and benevolent. It is an even greater fortune to be better understood by another than by one's own self. In effect, when I look back, I am rather struck by the discontinuity among my works, each of which takes on a specific problem and apparently has little more in common with its predecessor than the fact of having left an overflow of unanswered questions behind it as a residue. On the contrary, Domenico Jervolino's interpretation of my works, which extend over more than forty years, stresses their coherence, in spite of the gap in time between my present, soon to be issued work--Temps et Recit--and my first, Philosophie de la Volonte: Ie Volontaire et l'lnvolontaire. Our friend finds the principle of coherence first of all in the recurrence of a problem: the destiny of the idea of subjectivity, caught in the cross-fire between Nietzsche and Heidegger on one side and semiology, psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology on the other. He finds it likewise in the insistence on a method: the mediating role played by interpretation, mainly of texts, with regard to reflexion on self.

The path Husserl entered upon at the beginning of his philosophical writ ings turned out to be the beginning of a long, tedious way. Throughout his life he constantly comes to grips with the fundamental problems which set him upon this path. Beginning with the logical level of meaning, laboring through the idealism of the transcendental phenomenology of the period between Ideas I to the Meditations, in search for the ever more originary, he finally arrived at the level of the Lebenswelt. It was this later focus on the ever more originary, the source, the foundation of meaning which led him finally to the horizon of meaning and the genesis of meaning in the Lebenswelt period. This later period allows for a quasi wedding of his phenomenology with some adaptation of existentialism. But this union called for an adaptation of Husserl's logistic prejudice. The period of the Lebenswelt allows many of the later phenomenologists to speak of the failure of the brackets in their extreme exclusion and to allow for a link between man and his world in the Lebenswelt. This link is at the source of the ontological investigations and theories which arise from the phenomenological movement. However, there is the possibility of many tensions in such an endeavor since the study of being can be most abstract and most concrete.

With his writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideology, and religion, Paul Ricoeur has single-handedly redefined and revitalized the hermeneutic tradition. From Text to Action is an essential companion to the now classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its own philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K.O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own theorization of ideology to their version of ideology critique.

These nine essays present Ricoeur's interpretation of the most important of Husserl's writings, with emphasis on his philosophy of consciousness rather than his work in logic."