Comments on Mainstream Baptist: Au Revoir Paul Ricoeur

I'm an ex-fundamentalist, but Ricoeur's humane tho...

2005-05-25T16:54:00.000-05:00

I'm an ex-fundamentalist, but Ricoeur's humane thought is one of the few factors that might tempt me back to consider Christianity (albeit in a very different form). I don't always agree with him, but whatever he writes is imbued with a spirit of humility and openness; and he never forgets the realities of the suffering world. Those of his last essays I've read - essays which concentrated on the themes of memory, forgiveness, and forgetting - are some of the most powerful. Ricoeur may be dead but many of us will spend a lifetime discovering the riches of his thinking.

FP,Ricoeur's book on Freud is related to Symbolism...

2005-05-23T16:49:00.000-05:00

FP,

Ricoeur's book on Freud is related to Symbolism of Evil. Here are a couple paragraphs from the outstanding essay on Ricoeur in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia:

Ricoeur's conception of the disproportion that characterizes human beings was, he came to conclude, insufficient to account for occurrences of actual bad will and evil deeds. No direct, unmediated inspection of the cogito, as Descartes and Husserl had proposed, could show why these evils, contingent as each of them is, in fact came to be. Recognizing the opacity of the cogito in this respect confirmed his suspicion that all self-understanding comes about only through ?signs deposited in memory and imagination by the great literary traditions.?[4] This suspicion was a major motivator for his hermeneutic or ?linguistic turn.?

Ricoeur explored his suspicion first in The Symbolism of Evil, a study devoted to learning from the great symbols and myths how people have tried to make sense of the enigma of evil. Then he turned his attention to other aspects of the cogito's opacity. Stimulated by structuralism, he embarked upon a detailed study or psychoanalysis that culminated in his Freud and Philosophy and the essays that make up his The Conflict of Interpretations (1969). These investigations reinforced his view that there is no unmediated self-understanding.

PSDr.Bruce has convinced me to read The Symbolism ...

2005-05-23T16:04:00.000-05:00

PS

Dr.Bruce has convinced me to read The Symbolism of Evil...

I 'discovered' Ricouer while working on a senior t...

2005-05-23T16:01:00.000-05:00

I 'discovered' Ricouer while working on a senior thesis on Michel Foucault (hey,it was 1978)--Ricouer was onto the idea of "discourse" as a system way before Foucault. He also wrote a killer book on Freud...What a towering genius-- you're right, people will read him long after they stop trying to make sense of Sartre!

FP

FP

shadow's hope will be realised, in my opinion. i ...

2005-05-23T13:17:00.000-05:00

shadow's hope will be realised, in my opinion. i also suspect that over the next years a lot more people will come to realise how deep ricouer's influence has really been.

Amen to that, Shadow!Peace,Mike

2005-05-22T17:46:00.000-05:00

Amen to that, Shadow!

Peace,

Mike

It's always a sad day when great minds are laid to...

2005-05-22T14:25:00.000-05:00

It's always a sad day when great minds are laid to rest. It is my hope that Ricoueur will be remembered more than Sartre as the best French philosopher of the 20th century.