This article aims to investigate the dialectical tension between the symbol and the cogito in the role Ricoeur attributes to them: the beginning of philosophizing. This approach also reveals the complex dynamic interplay which occurs between two philosophical viewpoints: hermeneutics and reflection. Their dialogue creates a horizon which can host the aporia of this dual beginning. This complex dialectical interplay which develops between the symbol and the cogito can be read as a hermeneutic circle capable of generating meaning. However, it is a new kind of hermeneutic circle, with two actors who derive meaning from each other and who find their ultimate meaning in each other. The cogito and the symbol are the two poles of a magnetic field capable of generating lines of force which keep them in constant connection but also in perennial reciprocal tension. Ricoeur's hermeneutics consists in the study of metaphor and narrative text, and his reflection must respond to the challenge to the cogito posed by the so called masters of suspicion. In the end a new concept of identity is inspired by this double movement: the narrative identity.

Throughout the history of Western thinking, a way to relate language to being, founded on the duality between language and reality, subject and object, has emerged. On the basis of this duality, language was conceived as a means to describe, indicate and represent reality. By breaking with this point of view, Paul Ricoeur sought new linguistic strategies and ways to express reality through the analysis of poetic language. He based this possibility on the idea of the hermeneutic circle in the ontological sense. Thus, there is no duality between language and being, but rather a strict affinity. In this paper, my aim is to retrace and explain the fundamental theoretical aspects of the different linguistic strategies which can be established with reality according to Ricoeur. Therefore, I intend to demonstrate that the notions of “truth”, “being” and “reality” change according to the linguistic strategy adopted to express being. Thus, I will attempt to show that the perspective of reality and truth emerging from the potential of poetic language have consequences on man’s ethical level.

This paper deals about the articulation of the theories of text and action in Paul Ricœur’s theory of narration. Passing throughout his lecture of Aristotle’s Poetics, in particular his reception of the notions of mimesis and mythos (which converge in Ricœur’s notion of plot) we will show how the distinction of three levels of the Aristotelian notion of mimesis (I, II, III) can explain the construction of sense in narrative texts. In this reflection on the articulation of text and action, Ricœur’s theory of narration meets the narrative and generative semiotics proposed by Algirdas J. Greimas. The concept of transformation in their reflection on narration is the presupposed reason of this encounter. Finally, we will show how and why their theories of narration converge or diverge.

This paper suggests an interpretation of crisis and conflict from the point of view of images, they play such an important role in the contemporary world. This thesis will be discussed in three steps. In the first one I develop a short semantic introduction, not pretending to be systematic, rather intending to “take a walk” through the concept of crisis in order to follow the trajectory that links it to the idea of conflict, through the concept of critic. In the second part, I talk about the crisis and the conflict that opposed two different concepts of image in byzantine iconoclasm, during the eighth century. Finally, I attempt to apply Ricoeur’s essay L’herméneutique du témoignage to the problem of the critic of the images. How can Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of witness contribute to the critic and to the distinction of the images in the contemporary world?

As Ricoeur’s own discussions reflected, contemporary political theory has typically assumed dichotomous positions between political liberals, who assume that individuals are in a position of otherness to one another, and communitarians, who assume that individuals are at bottom the same. Rather than develop Ricoeur’s own response to this dichotomy, this paper draws on Ricoeur’s work in the philosophy of language – in particular, his work on metaphor – to argue that this dichotomy can be mediated. Beyond the dichotomy between the other as other or as the same, metaphor offers the possibility of the relation between self and other as one of “resemblance,” of similarity across difference. Metaphor also offers the prospect of creating resemblance, of finding similarity despite an initial situation of distance. Metaphor resists relativism or simple pluralism, as metaphor has a vertical dimension, a tie to basic ontological understandings that at the same time, in their metaphoricity, require humility in interpretation. The paper here seeks to develop Ricoeur’s cryptic remarks on the basic “metaphoric” that may be “at the root of all classification.” The paper will argue for a reformulation of the just and illustrate its thesis on the basis of contemporary political examples drawn particularly from the United States.

This paper takes Ricoeur’s position that philosophy must be useful in the real world. With this core assumption, the focus is upon consideration of political languages in this age of extremes and then, briefly, of religious identities in this age of demanding recognition. Each phenomenon - political languages and religious identities – can be seen as condensed into the negative and artificially exaggerated polarities between secularism and Islamism and a powerful inductive fallacy. Moreover, academic researchers are under pressure because research is more politicised than ever before. Ricoeur’s writings about language and violence and secularism can help researchers to attain clarity. His early unpublished work on negation is particularly useful for analysing the ideological polarization that appears to have been effected between certain belief systems. This early work also helps to explain human tendencies towards a ubiquitous calculus of negation that must be addressed.

In the contemporary epoch, characterized by world wars, religious conflicts and economic crises, the respect of the otherness and the dignity of interpersonal relationships has come to be problematic. This essay highlights the possibility of rethinking an authentic otherness relationship through the rediscovery of a figure of freedom: the meta-conflicting freedom. The main references are Lévinas' and Ricœur's works, with a particular focus on Totality and Infinity and The Course of Recognition. The possibility of peace is open but not automatically ensured.

Moving from the hermeneutic assumption of ricoeurian philosophy, this essay investigates how thinking in medias res “and never at the beginning or at the end” allows for carrying out a reflection which stems from the manifold modalities of being in the world, and also allows for its transformation into word by that man capable of talking, acting, narrating himself, feeling responsible, whom Ricoeur is endlessly outlining in his work. This provides for the philosophy of deviations and crossings, which regulates thinking in view of the confrontation and dialogue with all positions – including those more distant from Ricoeur. From this perspective, despite the impossibility of reconciling philosophical and theological-religious thinking, Ricœur acknowledges the existence of “intersections” and exchanges, whereas the latter may give the former “to think”. So it is for the meditation on Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection in an anti-sacrificial perspective. In this case, Ricœur encounters the Johannine interpretation proposed by Xavier Léon-Dufour, whose essence is briefly resumed here. The philosophical proposal originating from it becomes ethical in Ricœur, himself presenting it as a “positive ethics of detachment”: the detachment from all post-mortem concerns for better focussing on the opportunity which Jesus’ death and resurrection offer, in the first place, to human action in the “communitarian diakonia”; in the second place, to the recovery of sense through looking “at the essence”.

In this paper, I intend to compare Ricoeur's thought about sollicitude and the role of the pitié in Rousseau's moral and political philosophy. This comparison can further enrich the reflection on the social link, an important topic in many debates about the crisis. These two philosophers examine the distinction between civic relationship and interpersonal relations, between the civic relationship and the relations that men need. Their analyses lead us to think more accurately the foundation of civic link in light of the contemporary debates about human rights in precarious situation and the conflicts between care and justice.

The question of personal identity is an essential topic of Ricoeur's hermeneutics. Working on his theory of narrative identity, Ricoeur frequently refers to Arendt's reflections on narration, in particular those contained in The Human Condition. His discussion of Arendt's thought constitutes, therefore, a starting point from which to shape his own theory of the self. This paper aims to analyze both Ricoeur's and Arendt's notions of narration and narrative identity. First, it compares the parallel approaches the two authors hold toward narration. For Arendt narration is mostly a storytelling performance on the public domain, about the life of someone, whose meaning is established for those who remain. Ricoeur, on the other hand, stresses the hermeneutic function of narration and narration as a text. He argues that both these elements allow to understand the life of characters and to give a new configuration to one's own identity. Eventually, this paper claims that these different notions of narration bring Ricoeur and Arendt to highlight two different impacts of narrative identity, respectively ethical and political. Such a comparison enables us to focus on personal identity in a more comprehensive sense.

In Paul Ricœur’s Parcours de la reconnaissance, the interest for Recognition as an epistemological and, above all, ethical category derives, as in Honneth, by the fact that it seems to be able to go beyond the two principal moments of the otherness: Ego and Alter, by integrating them in the intersubjective relationship. But Ricœur’s problem is how to save the reciprocity of Recognition without inherently annulling, the otherness. In order to solve it, the French philosopher follows Honneth in his “post-metaphysical” reconstruction of the Hegelian Anerkennung. Still, he does not follow him completely. Starting from his critic to the presumed mauvais infini, that Ricœur blames in Honneth’s Strength for Recognition, and from the multiple ways in which, in his work, otherness and reciprocity are declined, we will try to strengthen the Recognition theory and, in some way, to rethink it differently from the meaning that both authors gave to it. How to effectively and adequately integrate the otherness in a Recognition theory whose goal is social criticism? This is the question we aim to answer to.

Psychoanalysis is the science of observing the facts of our inner selves. The distinguishing paradox of its epistemological profile is synthesized in the impossibility for these facts to directly emerge to the conscience, though also to be denied: human depth is strangely evident and hidden at once. The intent of this article consists in deepening the paradoxical sense of Freud’s science, first of all through the analytical and critical reading that Paul Ricoeur has handed down us with his work, De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud (1965); besides, it deals with establishing that the hermeneutical function alone is one hand necessary to bring the so-called energetic existential out, while also insufficient to thoroughly account for it; indeed, a further epistemological function is needed capable of establishing its existence, prior to the necessary –though always subordinate- dimension of sense: yet through Ricoeur’s philosophy and, specifically, through the faculty of attestation, we could try to resolve the linguistic deficiency of psychoanalysis.

In this work I put forward a comparison between Paul Ricœur’s and Ernst Bloch’s thought, that is affected by their cultural background : Ricœur belongs to the Christian Protestant faith, instead Bloch practices a critical Marxist theory. They share two main basic themes: the utopian hope and the issue about religion, but their analyses imply different philosophical thesis. Ricœur highlights the unfathomable novelty on the horizon of the utopian hope, on the other hand Bloch encloses it within an ideological prospect. About religion they don’t agree either. I point out this paradox: Ricœur, who is a religious believer, draws a distinction between religion and philosophy , whereas Bloch, who is a Marxist, states that the atheist is a good Christian and that the Marxist thought could inherit the genuine religion. Finally, both philosophers theorize about the ‘not-yet ontology’ referred to utopian hope and religion, but their theories take different pathways.

The first part of the paper places Augustine’s and Ricœur’s reflections on evil and textual hermeneutics in their right perspective. The hypothesis is that they both try to articulate an exegetical method through the true «thing of the text» and that their notion of evil is precisely the paradigm of such a «thing». In the second part it is argued that Augustine’s and Ricœur’s hermeneutics move along opposite directions, from allegorical interpretation to allegorical expression in the first case, from symbols to narrations in the second case. The last part is devoted to the problem of evil in order to show how, beyond all criticism, Ricœur shares and radicalizes the Augustinian position. Once the two opposite hermeneutics have been tested on the benchmark of the shared concept of evil, it is shown that Augustine is somehow more consistent than Ricœur in thinking the hermeneutics of evil.