Doutor -- Escola Nacional de Saude Publica, Rio de Janeiro, 1999.

Over the last century America’s rampant individualism has contributed to an eroding sense of communal togetherness. As numerous sociologists have shown, a sense of community in America declines, and experiences of loneliness and absence fill its vacancy. This dissertation argues that Paul Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity illuminates an underutilized resource that can allay the problem of community by counteracting its decay and providing a foundation for coming together. Ricoeur’s narrative theory is well-suited to deal with the problem because narratives offer diagnoses of the current situation and help direct ameliorative efforts. His theory diagnoses community in America as comprised of lonely people; it is a collection comprised of those who do not have a community. But, from the standpoint of narrativity, this is not a simple reiteration of the fact that Americans experience loneliness. The notion of narrative highlights our present loneliness and draws our attention to our current predicament. As we will see, authentic narratives are formed from raw, gross experiential resources, which are then woven together to create a new whole, a plot. Being drawn to our current predicament affords new vistas from which to direct ameliorative efforts By turning to Ricoeur’s concept of narrative, one can grow community in America by forming a community of absence, a community formed by lonely individuals through the sharing of memories of loss and absence. Like members of Alcoholics Anonymous who share memories of loss, Americans can share stories of absence to grow community in America. Turning toward Ricoeur’s concept of narrative yields a non-nostalgic understanding of cultivating community that develops from a sense of loneliness, alienation, and disconnection.

Thesis advisor: Jane E. Regan / This project explores the concept of identity through the lens of narrativity, a multifaceted concept that describes the way the consciousness makes meaning about life, throughout life. Narrativity depicts meaning-making as both an intensely personal and communal endeavor, epitomized in the way people tell and listen to life stories together. Narrativity is endemic to who we are as humans; yet it dramatically evolves over time. Indeed, it must continuously evolve, so that we might continue to learn, love, and maintain hope amidst the myriad circumstances and exigencies we face. And so when theologians and researchers in the social sciences alike speak of an “identity crisis” at work in the United States today, they are speaking directly to a deficiency in the way people make meaning together—a deficiency that, in the present view, is indelibly linked to the country’s history of hegemonic, colonizing practices of exclusion and domination by those in power. This history, which is also our present, has profoundly shaped the capacities of people from every walk of life to co-create meaning. Understood in this way, identity formation must be seen as a pivotal task for Christian religious educators in the United States. Of course, such educators are typically interested in the formation of a “Christian identity,” and rightly so. But this work makes the case that nurturing narrativity—that is, personhood and personal identity-development—is part and parcel to Christian identity formation, which in turn is inseparable from social and political engagement. In this view, narrativity is actually ingrained into the very pedagogy and praxis of the discipling community that Jesus cultivated through his ministry. Present-day Christian communities should likewise consider themselves as discipling communities, who embody this collective (or communal) identity precisely to the extent that they cultivate narrativity through their missional-pedagogical practices. This will require most US churches to radically re-imagine their structure and aims. The primary tasks of this work are threefold: (1) It defines identity in terms of the psychosocial and spiritual notion of narrativity—and Christian identity in terms of discipleship, which awakens and restores narrativity. These definitions inform a holistic philosophy of narratival meaning-making, and a practical and liberationist approach to theological anthropology, ethics, and ecclesial mission. (2) It attempts to depict narrativity as it evolves through the lifespan, with the help of current research in neuroscience and narrative developmental psychology. This is articulated in terms of a “narratival-developmental” perspective. (3) Guided by these definitions, it suggests ways that churches in the present-day United States might begin to re-orient their missional and teaching practices around these notions of narrativity and narratival-development. Chief among these suggestions are four hypothesized principles for teaching for narrativity, which emerge at project’s end. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

Thesis advisor: Patrick H. Byrne / It has been held in philosophical practice that some matters of reflection have more import than others, and that some are so significant that they may be termed "first philosophy." In contemporary Continental philosophy, the term "event" has become a watchword for a profound change in the orientation of philosophic thought. Indeed, one may say that the discourse surrounding events marks the first decisive development in philosophy since Martin Heidegger penned Being and Time. This is not to say, however, that any consensus has emerged concerning either the character of events, or more importantly what they entail for the meaning of human historical consciousness. To provide such statements, ones that have at least a relative superiority with respect to their rivals, might thus be considered the basic task for first philosophy today. It is to accomplish this double aim that the present work is devoted. These two tasks, articulating the character of events and their significance for human historical consciousness, are here assayed by a movement that is itself double, by a movement of suspicion and affirmation. In the specific case, the present work undertakes a retrieval of Heidegger's understanding of "Ereignis" (or event) after passing through a hermeneutics of suspicion, posed by the criticisms of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, and returning to an articulation of "Emergence" as a complementary hermeneutics of affirmation. The method by which I undertake this inquiry is what may be called an "infinite hermeneutics," which I intend to be opposed to "finite hermeneutics." By this latter program, "finite hermeneutics," I mean any form of philosophical hermeneutics that is committed to the thesis that human understanding (Verstehen) is finite, or that the objective of inquiry itself is finite, or both of these points. The thesis that human understanding is finite may be found in Kant's proposal that human knowing is distinct from divine knowledge in the respect that human knowing is dependent on receptive intuition, and thus finite, while infinite knowledge is founded on a productive intuition. In the relevant sense, I argue, it may also be found in Heidegger's own thought. One of the major points of the present investigation is to demonstrate in what way a commitment to finitude is highly problematic, and that human knowing, human comprehension, and even the very character of what is known is not finite in any relevant sense. The motivation for such a departure is provided by the criticisms of Badiou, which are here treated as a moment of suspicion. I begin the work with a "Prolegomenon," which reviews in detail the specific challenge Badiou has posed for phenomenological hermeneutics, or any other philosophical position that is committed to the notion that human thought or understanding is finite. As a "Prolegomenon," however, nothing positive for my own position is accomplished there; instead the net result of the study is to produce: (a) an argument against Heideggerian finite hermeneutics, (b) a summary critique of the Badiou's own position, and (c) a clear statement on the eight separate tasks that I set out to accomplish in the argument that follows. The positive aspect of the text, the beginning of the movement of affirmation, thus occurs in "Part I: Infinite Hermeneutics," in which I present a defense of phenomenological hermeneutics as a viable philosophical method. In chapter three I begin by drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur. My argument is that he is both the very first philosopher to articulate an infinite hermeneutics, and that this account, suitably elaborated throughout his career, is able to meet most of the specific challenges Badiou poses. There does remain, however, three separate points that Ricoeur's thought does not fully explore. In order to remedy those deficiencies, and in order to demonstrate the relative advantage of my hermeneutical position with respect to its competitors, I thus move to produce a new model for hermeneutical thought. Articulating the conditions for this model is the task for chapter four. My task here resolves into three parts. First, I argue for a Galoisian Revolution in phenomenological study, which sets forth a new between hermeneutics and phenomenology study. This relation, second, requires a rearticulation of phenomenological method such that it is "impersonal," as Jean-Paul Sartre's early work suggests. Additionally this relation, third, requires that one be attentive to the structures of consciousness, which is what completes the Galoisian Revolution. In order to support my account of an impersonal phenomenology I engage the contemporary Anglo-American discussions in the philosophy of mind concerning the character of first-person consciousness. In order to specify what is intended by a structure of first-person consciousness, provide a provisional phenomenology of eros. In chapter five I move to articulate the structure of consciousness that serves as the third model for phenomenological hermeneutics. It is at this point that I engage with the work of Bernard Lonergan. My central contention in chapter five is that it is possible to retrieve Longergan's work on cognitional structure as a phenomenology of inquiry for hermeneutical purposes. Taken together, these points, the Ricoeurean defense of hermeneutics, the development of an impersonal phenomenology, and the retrieval of a phenomenology of inquiry, form the hard core of my proposal for infinite hermeneutics. "Part II: On Worlds" concerns the fruits that I can reap from the harvest sown in Part I. In particular, I aim to develop an ecological sense of worlds in response to Badiou's category-theoretic and Heidegger's (early) existential world. My argument moves from an ecological account of natural worlds (chapter six), through a signifying account human worlds (chapter seven), to an account of human historical consciousness and a consideration of catastrophes such as the Shoah and the Encounter (chapter eight). In each of these chapters I focus on developing an account of different kinds of Events, with the aim not only of providing a more serviceable account than my rivals, but also with the hopes of providing a new and better picture of world process. The final section, "Part III: The Metaphysics of Excess" expresses the central Metaphysical claims of the work, especially those concerning Events and the peculiar form I call Emergence. This chapter, in short, constitutes the moment of affirmation in response to the moment of suspicion occasioned by Badiou's criticism of phenomenological hermeneutics. Additionally, however, I produce an argument for the intelligible relation of cosmic space and time with human (lived) space and time, a statement on the new forms of causation entailed by the possibility of Events, and a new account of Truth (to rival Badiou and Heidegger's). The work closes with a summary review of what I have achieved and what yet remains to be accomplished. Though as the title of the conclusion suggests, its main aim is to provide a new statement on the world-view that I work to articulate over the course of the investigation. That world-view, and this is the justification for the subtitle of the present work, is the trans-modern condition, which articulates the existential character of our modern globalized world. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / This dissertation work examines culture as a condition, as a context, and, finally, as an achievement. The research objectives for this examination are both historical and philosophical. The historical objective is to retrace the appearance of the notion of culture in the works of Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), and to demonstrate that Ricoeur adopts and adapts the term to his philosophical vocabulary. The accompanying philosophical objective, the proper task of this dissertation, is equally twofold. At the scholarly level this dissertation reconstructs - in the form of a hermeneutic of cultural recognition - Paul Ricoeur's cultural theory, and explicates why such a theory is necessary relative to Ricoeur's more openly-argued anthropological phenomenology of "being able." I maintain that all anthropological thought requires the support of cultural understanding, as no comprehensive anthropology is possible without the philosophical elaboration of the cultural condition that concerns human situatedness. The ultimate aim of this dissertation, however, is to go beyond this scholarly analysis and point out a subjective cultural hermeneutic process under the peculiar "dramatic" modality of this dissertation. This postcritical process is what I sum up with the term re-con-naissance. The reception of a cultural heritage is reaffirmed in the incessant task of acquiring a notion of one's self through hermeneutic reappropriation, or, as a perpetual task of freedom and the fulfillment of fundamental human possibilities in the interpretation of one's culture. Put differently, the matter of this dissertation is to recognize (reconnaître) this level of cultural hermeneutics that is unceasingly present; to expose a postcritical depth structure that takes place in the reader's own reconfigurative process as culturally enabled re-con-naissance. Since this hermeneutic concerns the postcritical interpretive reflection of a living, acting and struggling human subject - and is, therefore, not directly explainable - this reconfiguration can only be pointed at or suggested. In spite of its postcritical aim, therefore, the dissertation remains an academic work that functions at the level of critical explanation. The postcritical cultural hermeneutics has to be approached through the critical means that are exemplified by the scholarly analysis in this dissertation; our analysis stands for the critical and objectifying (academic) culture within which the reader reads this dissertation as a cultural and interpretive subject. After having propaedeutically explained the critical scholarly course and the ultimate postcritical task of this dissertation in part one, part two then breaks open the realm of cultural hermeneutics in the work of Paul Ricoeur by "letting it appear" through the critical analysis of the different perceptions concerning his last major work The Course of Recognition. This is the moment of "re-" or re-membering again the cultural condition. Ricoeur's post-Hegelian notion of "cultural objectification" necessitates, however, examining the synthetic moment of "con." Part three analyzes this "con" by pointing out a trajectory of Ricoeur's "post-Hegelian Kantian" though in his early works that runs from the condition of objectivity to cultural objectivity, and furthermore to a poetically constituted hermeneutic of culture. In turn, part four contrasts Ricoeur's thought with that of Martin Heidegger, focusing on Ricoeur's later works that propose an etho-poetics of culture that is manifested in institution. Part four, which closes off the scholarly analysis of Ricoeur's cultural hermeneutics, thereby displays the moment of "naissance," or "having-been-born-as-an-ethico-political-subject." The last part of this dissertation, part five, distances itself from the academic or scholarly mode by revealing the underlying "dramatic" structure of this dissertation. As a re-reading of the reading of Ricoeur's work in parts two, three, and four, part five exposes a new dimension to the whole of this work; namely, an experiential one that concerns the current reader of the work and his or her cultural re-con-naissance. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

鄭威鵬. / 論文 (哲學碩士)--香港中文大學, 1999. / 參考文獻 (leaves 109-114). / 附中英文摘要. / Zheng Weipeng. / Lun wen (zhe xue shuo shi)-- Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 1999. / Can kao wen xian (leaves 109-114). / Fu Zhong Ying wen zhai yao. / Chapter 第一章 --- 導言 / Chapter 第一節、 --- 「自我」與「歷史的政治」:從一段「敘述」說起 --- p.1 / Chapter 第二節、 --- 本文的問題架構、硏究進路以及論述結構 --- p.11 / Chapter 第三節、 --- 本文的限制以及對本文硏究進路的幾點說明 --- p.14 / Chapter 第四節、 --- 補充：對「歷史」、「自我」等槪念的規定和說明 --- p.19 / Chapter 第二章 --- 歷史、自我與政治：從利科的「敘述哲學」之觀點看 / Chapter 第一節、 --- 時間與敘述 --- p.31 / Chapter 第二節、 --- 利科的三重模仿論 --- p.34 / Chapter 第三節、 --- 敘事同一 --- p.53 / Chapter 第四節、 --- 以「歷史」爲中介取得某種秩序和自由如何可能？ --- p.60 / Chapter 第三章 --- 由歷史到政治 / Chapter 第一節、 --- 由「非敘述化」到「返問」歷史的敘述性基礎 --- p.67 / Chapter 第二節、 --- 在意識型態與烏托邦之間：歷史，作爲一種社會想像 --- p.88 / 結語 --- p.103 / 參考書目 --- p.109

Esse trabalho trata da visão de ética do filósofo francês Paul Ricoeur (19132005), especialmente da interface entre suas propostas éticas e a história. Como forma de abordarmos essa questão, levantamos um debate acerca das considerações de Hayden White sobre a obra de Ricoeur, em que a trata como uma “metafísica da narratividade”. Nesse sentido, fazemos uma leitura de três fases de produção do filósofo francês, estabelecendo algumas conexões contextuais e propondo uma análise teórica do percurso de suas concepções, objetivando a sua relação com a história dos historiadores e com o tema da condição histórica. O objetivo fundamental do trabalho é refletir sobre a dinâmica dessa relação com o desdobramento de seus temas éticos. / This work deals with the ethical vision of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (19132005), especially the interface between their ethical proposals and history. In order to approach this question, we raise a debate about Hayden White considerations on the work of Ricoeur, which treats its work as a “Metaphysics of Narrativity”. In this sense, we do a reading of tree stages of production of the French philosopher, establishing some contextual connections and proposing a theoretical analysis of the course of their conceptions, aiming its relation to the history of historians and the theme of the historical condition. The fundamental objective is to reflect on the dynamics of that relationship with the deployment of its ethical issues.

The problem that this thesis seeks to address is the hermeneutic tension between practical reason and technology. According to hermeneutics, the types of knowledge associated with practical understanding incorporate questions of the self and lived experience. In contrast, the types of knowledge and capability associated with modern technology are independent of questions of self-understanding. Technical approaches to practical dilemmas produce generalizable, detachable solutions, thereby disavowing the central role of hermeneutic appropriation in the process of understanding meaning. If a technology works in the same way across different contexts and applications, the notion of an interpreting, appropriating self seems superfluous to the question of technology. However, following an analysis of Paul Ricoeur’s distinctive understandings of hermeneutic distanciation, appropriation, and technique, I argue that technologies can become objects of hermeneutic engagement once we recognize their variable and uncertain nature at the practical level. Using Ricoeur’s conception of the productive circle between distanciation and belonging, the alienating distances associated with technologies can be re-read as moments of distanciation, i.e., as reflective outcomes of practical engagements that, in turn, project new possibilities for action an understanding. This means that our practical self-understanding is as bound to techniques and technologies as it is to more conventional hermeneutic objects like a text, narrative or artwork. For Ricoeur, hermeneutic techniques are meaningful because they reveal possibilities for action that would otherwise remain concealed. Likewise, subjects engaging with technologies develop unanticipated applications and functions at the practical level through appropriating technologies in novel, creative ways. In this way, practical self-understanding and technologies depend on one another for development. This mutual, interpretive interaction reveals a hermeneutic circle between the practical self and the technical devices and artefacts that mediate self-understanding at a distance.

This thesis’ task is to reinterpret Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will, hermeneutics, and study of metaphor from a perspective that speaks to what his early work conceptualized as a poetics of freedom. Poetics, for Ricoeur, becomes a mode of expression capable of representing and illuminating what he considers the essential paradox of our human condition: a will that is both free and bound, “set free as freedom and responsible in its very deliverance.” A poetics of freedom, Ricoeur conceptualized in the beginning of his career, would be a mediation through which we perceive a tensional reconciliation of our conflicted natures, “a linguistic register suitable for speaking of liberated freedom and liberated man in his existential concreteness and totality.” Ricoeur, however, never developed the poetics of freedom beyond its original conceptualization. Through an interpretive analysis of Ricoeur's work, I reorient his later works on metaphor and hermeneutics towards the concerns that dominated the philosophy of the will and the existential philosophy to which it belongs. This study of Ricoeur’s philosophy of being occurs in discourse with a poetic text, Dante’s Commedia. The Commedia, I argue, is a text whose poetry explicitly and implicitly discloses the importance of hermeneutics and poetics in the arrival at self-understanding. The correlations that arise between its aesthetic discourse and Ricoeur’s contemporary perspective illuminate what I consider to be at the core of the philosophy of being: a primordial tension of selfhood conceptualized in terms of the dialectical relations that arise between freedom and nature, between objectivity and subjectivity, and between perspective and meaning; or in Dante’s terms, between my life and la nostra vita (our life).

This thesis’ task is to reinterpret Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will, hermeneutics, and study of metaphor from a perspective that speaks to what his early work conceptualized as a poetics of freedom. Poetics, for Ricoeur, becomes a mode of expression capable of representing and illuminating what he considers the essential paradox of our human condition: a will that is both free and bound, “set free as freedom and responsible in its very deliverance.” A poetics of freedom, Ricoeur conceptualized in the beginning of his career, would be a mediation through which we perceive a tensional reconciliation of our conflicted natures, “a linguistic register suitable for speaking of liberated freedom and liberated man in his existential concreteness and totality.” Ricoeur, however, never developed the poetics of freedom beyond its original conceptualization. Through an interpretive analysis of Ricoeur's work, I reorient his later works on metaphor and hermeneutics towards the concerns that dominated the philosophy of the will and the existential philosophy to which it belongs. This study of Ricoeur’s philosophy of being occurs in discourse with a poetic text, Dante’s Commedia. The Commedia, I argue, is a text whose poetry explicitly and implicitly discloses the importance of hermeneutics and poetics in the arrival at self-understanding. The correlations that arise between its aesthetic discourse and Ricoeur’s contemporary perspective illuminate what I consider to be at the core of the philosophy of being: a primordial tension of selfhood conceptualized in terms of the dialectical relations that arise between freedom and nature, between objectivity and subjectivity, and between perspective and meaning; or in Dante’s terms, between my life and la nostra vita (our life).