Philosophy and religion: the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur

During the 1970s, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur carried out two separate projects that came to be known as his philosophical hermeneutics and biblical hermeneutics. Until now, these two bodies of work have been perceived as broadly independent from one another. The current study sets out to offer a re- appraisal of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical outlook from this period, and to determine the role of religious reflection in it. By focusing on Ricoeur’s publications from 1968 to 1979, it is initially observed that his hermeneutics presents striking similarities with the, so called, Romantic model of the 19th century. Part 1 of the thesis therefore considers Ricoeur’s critique of the hermeneutical tradition and how, from the outset, he aligns his own research with the ‘universal’ principles of Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is specifically shown that Ricoeur appropriated from Schleiermacher the belief that only through a back-and-forth movement between general philosophical theory and regional interpretation can hermeneutics become a serviceable tool for the human sciences. It is further contended that, following this ‘general-regional’ outlook, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics took shape through a ‘constructed opposition’ between philosophical and biblical hermeneutics. Part 2 of the thesis provides a detailed examination of the individual investigations that Ricoeur carried out during the 1970s, in particular highlighting how his explorations of polysemy, metaphor and poetic language brought together the study of “language as discourse” and biblical exegesis. It is hoped that, by exposing the relationship between these two competing facets of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, this research allows for a more widespread re-appraisal of the compatibility between contemporary philosophy of language and biblical textuality.