Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation

Description

Collected and translated by John B. Thompson, this collection of essays by Paul Ricoeur includes many that had never appeared in English before the volume's publication in 1981. As comprehensive as it is illuminating, this lucid introduction to Ricoeur's prolific contributions to sociological theory features his more recent writings on the history of hermeneutics, its central themes and issues, his own constructive position and its implications for sociology, psychoanalysis and history. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Charles Taylor, illuminating its enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this classic work has been revived for a new generation of readers.

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, most famous for his methodological approach of combining hermeneutics and phenomenology. John B. Thompson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on contemporary social and political theory and his most recent publications include Merchants of Culture (2010) and Books in the Digital Age (2005).

'[Ricoeur] does capture a quite crucial point of Peirce's concept of interpretation: its 'synechistic' nature, namely the continuous, non-extrinsic character of the relationship between (to use Ricoeur's terminology) 'tradition' - what a text or other forms of discourse signify (tradit) - and 'interpretation' - what it evokes in the mind of the interpreter.' Francesco Poggiani , Phenomenological Reviews