ABSTRACT

Paul Ricoeur’s contribution to hermeneutical thinking is highly original, exceptionally wide ranging, and often extremely complex, developing in a succession of linked theoretical projects over the course of a long academic career.1 In addition to an abiding concern with the hermeneutic lineage itself, these successive exercises have drawn variously upon the fields of phenomenology, analytical philosophy, linguistics, literary theory, anthropology and social science, as well as history. The breadth of Ricoeur’s work is also marked by its characteristically generous and inclusive tone; both the profound force of the work and the tenacity of its fundamental intellectual impulse are rendered more sympathetic and more persuasive by the absence of any appetite for gratuitous intellectual confrontation or positional posturing.2 Moreover, the range of Ricoeur’s project strikingly reflects the broad contemporary intellectual appeal and importance of interdisciplinarity as an epistemological approach for the twenty-first century.3 Just as Ricoeur’s noted rejection of intellectual approaches resting upon the Cartesian foundational self – ‘To say self is not to say I ’ – asserts that selfhood is always dependent upon otherness and mediation through ‘signs, symbols and texts’,4 so true disciplinary understanding always calls for sustained engagement with disciplinary others.5 In this way, perhaps, to say past is not only to say history. In David Kaplan’s astute commentary, Ricoeur’s intellectual approach to the past comprehends that ‘time, narrative, history and hermeneutics are interrelated parts of a whole’.6