The Ricoeurian Way: Towards A Critical Hermeneutics for the Human and Social Sciences

Focusing on Paul Ricœur’s philosophical methodology as practised in his mature speculative work, it is possible to profile a hermeneutical procedural model: that of a critical hermeneutics, methodologically and epistemologically structured, for the most part by following the theory of the arc herméneutique. Ricœur’s reinterpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis offers one of the first theoretical and disciplinary bases for this theory and his practice of philosophy offers in itself the model of a philosophy exercised as a practical theory and as a human and social science. Indeed, Ricœur’s critical hermeneutics is at once a philosophy, a philosophical approach, and a methodological model for the human and social sciences, which works to coordinate explanation and understanding under the rule of interpretation.