Études Ricoeuriennes / Ricoeur Studies

Après la « Petite Éthique » de Paul Ricœur (1990), le sens de sa révision (2001)

2023-09-29T13:56:50-04:00

Paul Ricœur presents his ethical thought in two important texts: first, in studies 7, 8, and 9 of Oneself as Another (1990), and eleven years later (2001), in the article, “From the Moral to the Ethical and to Ethics,” in Reflections on the Just. As well known, the discussion in Oneself as Another moves from ethics to morality to practical wisdom. The present article emphasizes the implications of Ricoeur’s rethinking of this relation in his 2001 presentation. There Ricoeur inverts his order, beginning with the morality of duty, the origin of which must be thought before the ethics of the good life, now called “anterior ethics.” Two questions are then posed: what is the basis of duty and obligation, and what is the relationship between practical wisdom and “posterior ethics,” the new title given to “practical wisdom”? Lastly, the article incorporates an essential detail Ricœur developed in his essay Love and Justice, with a view toward completing his most recent overview of ethics.

De Rawls à Ricœur : les paradoxes de la justice

2024-07-31T04:47:47-04:00

The article explores Ricœur’s critical interpretation of Rawls’ theory of social justice. While Ricœur has a dialectical conception of justice (where the “good” encompasses the “just”), contrasting with Rawls’ procedural approach (where the just is defined independently of the good), Ricœur shows a strong interest in Rawls’ ideas. He situates Rawls’ project within one of the moments of the dialectic of the just: the moral moment. This dialectic arises from the aporetic nature of the just and manifests in ethical life as three paradoxes: political, legal, and socio-economic. While Rawls’ approach struggles with these paradoxes, they are the driving force of Ricœur’s approach to justice, highlighting its strength.

Les apories de l'identité narrative

2023-11-18T04:24:13-05:00

The notion of narrative identity brings the possibility of self-identity (or idem-identity) with that of change. But is what Ricoeur calls a “dialectical” mediation between identity and change necessary? Only if identity is supposed to exclude change, but this is not the case with identity in the most fundamental sense of the term: numerical identity. The second difficulty is that Ricoeur often seems to reduce the notions of history and narration to one another. It is hardly controversial that we are historical beings, but does this mean that our identity depends on the narratives we fashion for our histories? Finally, the third aporia lies in the primordial position Ricoeur gives to fiction in his determination of narrative identity. However, it’s not at all clear that fictional characters enjoy a genuine identity in any possible sense: e.g., contemporary theorists of reference such as Saul Kripke and David Kaplan have insisted that fictional characters possess only an appearance of identity. How, then, can we make this semblance of identity, which amounts to a bundle of more or less stable characteristics, the model for addressing the question of the status of our real identities?

Comprendre Temps et récit II : du discours théorique au commentaire de Mrs Dalloway

2024-04-20T08:55:48-04:00

This article proposes a reading of Paul Ricœur’s Time and Narrative II. This book, which focuses on the idea of the configuration of time in narrative in order to ensure continuity between the prefiguration of narrative and its refiguration and also seeks to understand the specificity of fictional narrative in relation to historical narrative, is a three-dimensional discourse: philosophy, theories of narrative and major works of literature. The text poses a number of theoretical problems that will be considered here in relation to literary theory through a critical reflection informed by a reading of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway.

La Salade de Don Quichotte

2023-11-29T09:22:13-05:00

Cervantes’ Don Quixote occupies a singular place in the history of literary translation into French, at least because it has been the subject of incessant retranslations. But the book is particularly noteworthy because translation is thematized for its own sake in two places in it. By playing with the codes of the chivalry novel, Cervantes set the general framework for theoretical reflection on translation, the main tensions of which are highlighted in this paper. By internalizing its own fictional and translational origins, in an interlude straddling chapters VIII and IX, Don Quixote evokes both the idea of an impossible translation, but also that of translation as a particular reading modality, in which modern literature originates as a quasi-world (Ricœur) conducive to textual exchange. Finally, we show that, in so doing, Cervantes pointed unwittingly, of course, to both structuralism and the hermeneutic tradition and, ultimately, to their problematic articulation.

Solicitude, Emotions, and Narrative in Technology Design Ethics

2023-10-20T15:38:54-04:00

The first objective of this paper is to recognize the role of emotion and feeling in Ricœur’s “little ethics” and what they can further add to it, then to explore in more detail how solicitude as a virtue, and affective disposition more broadly, can contribute to a modern ethics of technology. Ultimately, emotions help us to understand technologies and technological ways of being today; Ricœur’s “little ethics”, along with his narrative theory, provide a framework for understanding the ethically salient aspects of technical practice, especially through the openness to the other demanded by solicitude, and essentially by emphasising emotion or feeling as a way of being in the world, and a mode of existence: one which is done with, if not sometimes because of, technology and technical practice.

Another in Oneself: Hybridity of the narrative identity and followability as narrative hospitality for others

2024-07-31T04:39:30-04:00

The following article investigates the hybridity of narrative identity. It explores how idem-identity and the ipse-identity interrelate through time and otherness and illustrates the process of self’s reflexive re-cognition via others. It posits that narrative identity encompasses both private and public dimensions, requiring a co-authorship that integrates collective identities. This article argues for an ethical dimension to this identity, emphasizing the reciprocal movement between self and other. It introduces the concept of followability, which involves reconstructing narratives in a resonance relationship, fostering narrative hospitality and mutual transformation. The study concludes by proposing an eschatological perspective as a horizon for followability, enhancing narrative refiguration through future-oriented imagination.