3 posts tagged “paul ricoeur”
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative (Temps et Récit), 3 vols. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-1988 (1981-1985).
I kind of want to Cafepress myself a JE COEUR PAUL RICOEUR T-shirt. I had been wondering where was the account of nineteenth-century historiography and the novel; why no one could engage with Hayden White's tropological theory of history without sliding into his dumb relativism; where was the reasonable account of those qualities that make narrative an indispensable counterweight to science which still took seriously the ways in which our lives are not very much like The Brothers Kamarazov. Every vein here is loaded with ore, and as with Truth and Method, which I read over the holidays, this was only a first pass through something I'll be returning to for a long time. (I did kind of skim the twenty pages about The Magic Mountain. Hans, the magic mountain sucks! Go home!)
I kind of want to Cafepress myself a JE COEUR PAUL RICOEUR T-shirt. I had been wondering where was the account of nineteenth-century historiography and the novel; why no one could engage with Hayden White's tropological theory of history without sliding into his dumb relativism; where was the reasonable account of those qualities that make narrative an indispensable counterweight to science which still took seriously the ways in which our lives are not very much like The Brothers Kamarazov. Every vein here is loaded with ore, and as with Truth and Method, which I read over the holidays, this was only a first pass through something I'll be returning to for a long time. (I did kind of skim the twenty pages about The Magic Mountain. Hans, the magic mountain sucks! Go home!)
Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970 (1965).
Whew! It's an admirable book, painstaking in its appreciation and critique of Freud and ascetic in its rejection of glib generalities; these same qualities also made it intermittently hard going for someone like me who am not much of a Freudian. I got the most out of the introduction and conclusion, which put Freud first next to Marx and Nietzsche, then with and against Hegel, and end up sketching a project for a combined phenomenology and hermeneutics. Meanwhile, the middle 400 pages are all about taking Freud on his own terms. And those terms - you know, I really respond to him with a unique combination of fascination in broad strokes and monumental indifference in matters of detail. I can only take the feces-penis-money-mother complex so far.
Whew! It's an admirable book, painstaking in its appreciation and critique of Freud and ascetic in its rejection of glib generalities; these same qualities also made it intermittently hard going for someone like me who am not much of a Freudian. I got the most out of the introduction and conclusion, which put Freud first next to Marx and Nietzsche, then with and against Hegel, and end up sketching a project for a combined phenomenology and hermeneutics. Meanwhile, the middle 400 pages are all about taking Freud on his own terms. And those terms - you know, I really respond to him with a unique combination of fascination in broad strokes and monumental indifference in matters of detail. I can only take the feces-penis-money-mother complex so far.
Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (Einführung in die Philosophische Hermeneutik). Trans. Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994 (1991).
Ormiston, Gayle L. and Alan D. Schrift, eds. The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.
It must be some kind of ironic comment on the hermeneutic tenet of openness to new ideas that a lot of this stuff seems like a confirmation in a different vocabulary of things I already believe. Also: my own dabbling in Philhellenism over the past year has not made German Philhellenism seem any less silly. But Gadamer and Ricoeur are clearly good fellows with more to say to me when I find the time, and Habermas is still a wanker.
Ormiston, Gayle L. and Alan D. Schrift, eds. The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.
It must be some kind of ironic comment on the hermeneutic tenet of openness to new ideas that a lot of this stuff seems like a confirmation in a different vocabulary of things I already believe. Also: my own dabbling in Philhellenism over the past year has not made German Philhellenism seem any less silly. But Gadamer and Ricoeur are clearly good fellows with more to say to me when I find the time, and Habermas is still a wanker.
