ABSTRACT
I want to begin with a few personal remarks about my encounters with Paul Ricoeur, for they are relevant to the topic that I will be exploring. I first met Paul in the late 1970s. I believe we first met at a conference on Hannah Arendt in Paris—one of the earliest conferences on her work in France. At the time there was barely any philosophical interest in Arendt, but Ricoeur and I shared an enthusiasm for her work. And we were both interested in her conception of action. Paul sometimes used my book Praxis and Action in the courses that he taught at the University of Chicago. But what really united us was his growing interest in, and contribution to, hermeneutics. In the 1970s and early 1980s there was a new interest in hermeneutics in America. In part this was due to the English translation of Gadamer’s Truth and Method. But there were other contributing factors, such as Habermas’s appreciation of the role of hermeneutics as a form of practical knowledge, which he explores in his Knowledge and Human Interests. And on the Anglo-American scene there was the appearance of Charles Taylor’s classic essay ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’. Even Thomas Kuhn came to appreciate that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had a deep affinity with hermeneutics. In 1977 Kuhn in The Essential Tension wrote,
What I as a physicist had to discover for myself, most historians learn by example in the course of professional training. Consciously or not, they are all practitioners of the hermeneutic method. In my case, however, the discovery of hermeneutics did more than make history seem consequential. Its most immediate and decisive effect was instead on my view of science.1
