hermeneutic phenomenology lectures and essays

1. Biographical Sketch Paul Ricoeur was born on February 27, 1913 in Valence, France. Orphaned in 1915 when his mother died and his father was killed soon thereafter in the Battle of the Marne, Ricoeur was reared by his paternal grandparents and an unmarried aunt in Rennes. He studied philosophy first at the University of Rennes and then at the Sorbonne. From the earliest years of his academic life he was convinced that there is a basic, irreducible difference between persons and things. Unlike things, persons can engage in free, thoughtful action. Nonetheless, he never accepted any version of a substance dualism in the person that the Cartesian cogito or the Kantian transcendental subject would require. After succeeding in his aggregation examination, he taught at lycées and studied in Germany until the outbreak of World War II. Soon after being drafted into the French army in 1940 he was captured and spent the rest of the war in prison camps in Germany. After the war, he completed his doctorate and was appointed lecturer in the history of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. He remained there until 1956, when he was named to the chair of general philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1967, he joined the faculty of the new University of Paris at Nanterre, now Paris X. Except for three years spent at Louvain, he taught there until he reached the mandatory retirement age in 1980. From 1954 on, Ricoeur also taught regularly in the United States. Among the schools at which he taught were Haverford, Columbia, and Yale. In 1967 Ricoeur was named to succeed Paul Tillich as the John Nuveen professor of philosophical theology at the University of Chicago, with joint appointments in the Divinity School, the Philosophy Department, and the Committee on Social Thought. He held this position until 1992. Ricoeur's work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Among his.
Institute for Hermeneutic PhenomenologyThe Institute for Hermeneutic Phenomenology (IHP) has a new format this year titled The School of Phenomenology:  Rethinking the University from Heidegger to Derrida.  During this institute, you will have the opportunity to explore primary philosophical texts and discuss the implications for research in health and human science. Each day will begin with a presentation by a guest philosopher. During afternoon sessions, you will work in small groups to further explore philosophical texts and hear presentations of current scholarship. Individual consultation with guest philosophers will be available. In this course we will examine the place of testimony and witnessing in the constitution of the self. We begin with two general accounts of the narrative self in Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur in order to show the importance of storytelling in identity and to examine some of the ethical issues that they raise. Against this background, we take up considerations of witnessing and testimony in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. Both of these philosophers address the role of testimony in their writings on the poet Paul Celan, a holocaust survivor, and we will read Celan's writings alongside his philosophical commentators. Gadamer's Who Am I and Who Are You? (1973) provides an overview of Celan's use of language while raising the question of how poems can testify to events. Derrida's Poetics and Politics of Witnessing (2004) concerns the limits of witnessing, while his essay Rams (2003) responds to Gadamer's account of Celan, emphasizing the role of bearing in bearing witness. Questions to be considered thus include: What does it mean to give a first-hand account of an experience? What is the language of testimony? Is poetry more able to bear witness than everyday speech? Is there anything that the self cannot incorporate.
Research and Teaching Interests John D. Caputo is a hybrid philosopher/theologian intent on producing impure thoughts, thoughts which circulate between philosophy and theology, short-circuits which deny fixed and rigorous boundaries between philosophy and theology. Caputo treats sacred texts as a poetics of the human condition, or as a theo-poetics, a poetics of the event harbored in the name of God. His past books have attempted to persuade us that hermeneutics goes all the way down (Radical Hermeneutics), that Derrida is a thinker to be reckoned with by theology (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida), and that theology is best served by getting over its love affair with power and authority and embracing what Caputo calls, following St. Paul, The Weakness of God. He has also addressed wider-than-academic audiences in On Religion and What Would Jesus Deconstruct? and has an interest in interacting with the working church groups like ikon and the “Emergent” Church. He is currently working in a book on our frail and mortal flesh, probably to be entitled The Fate of All Flesh: A Theology of the Event, II. Professor Caputo specializes in continental philosophy of religion, working on approaches to religion and theology in the light of contemporary phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction, and also the presence in continental philosophy of radical religious and theological motifs. He has special interests in the religion without religion of Jacques Derrida; the theological turn taken in recent French phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion and others); the critique of onto-theology; the question of post-modernism as post-secularism; the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with St. Augustine; the recent interest shown by philosophers in St. Paul; the link between Kierkegaard and deconstruction; Heidegger's early theological writings on Paul and Augustine; secular and death.
This book consists of three essays in which the author presents Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology (in contrast to what he calls Husserl's reflective phenomenology ), as developed in two early lecture courses that have now been published as Volumes 56/56[1] and 17[2] of the Gesamtausgabe and in §7 of Being and Time[3]. The first, by far the longest, essay is a reading of the 1919 lecture course; the second relies on the 1923/24 lectures; the third is an interpretation and commentary on the Heidegger's well-known description of phenomenology in the Introduction to BT. In each of these essays, the guiding theme is the contrast between Heidegger's phenomenology, which is an enactment of lived experience itself as the a- and pre-theoretical domain, which keeps itself closed off when we are theoretically oriented (13), and Husserl's phenomenology. It recounts how Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology takes as its starting point the concrete involvement of what will come to be called Dasein in the world as a significant whole in contrast to what von Hermann calls reflective phenomenology, which he describes as still trapped within the prejudices of traditional modern philosophy that is oriented primarily toward theory, which culminates in scientific knowledge and hence focuses primarily on perception as opposed to the fullness of engaged practical life. Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology is introduced in each of the essays by way of contrast to Husserl's reflective phenomenology with a slightly different emphasis in each of them, while they all at the same time follow Heidegger in acknowledging the key role that Husserl's phenomenology played for Heidegger in the development of his own positions. In the early 1919 lectures, as laid out in the first essay, such hermeneutical phenomenology is described as a form of understanding looking (21) that is fundamentally.