Ruled Imagination
Representation and Factuality in Historical Knowledge
Abstract
This paper aims to show how Paul Ricoeur’s inquiry on memory, trace, and testimony contributes to rebalancing a framework that, at the dialectical level between imagination and representation, would essentially present historians’ work as hermeneutical. In Ricoeur’s later writings, we find a differently balanced perspective by focusing the (neurobiological and psychological) substrate of representation behind trace and memory. Representation precedes interpretation. And neither memory’s fidelity nor history’s epistemic truth belong to a game that would be solely played within the communicative space of a plurality of cognitive agents who are exchanging, controlling and sharing their experiences. Consequently, the reality of the past itself emerges in the practice of memory’s background.
Downloads
References
Dosse, F. - Goldenstein, C. Dir. (2013). Paul Ricœur. Penser la mé-moire. Paris: Seuil.
Jervolino, D. (2002). Paul Ricœur. Une herméneutique de la condi-tion humaine. Paris: Ellipses.
Michel, J. (2013). L’énigme de la représentance. In F. Dosse, C. Gol-denstein (dir.), Paul Ricœur: penser la mémoire, op. cit., 277–290.
Ricoeur, P. (1976). L’imagination dans le discours et dans l’action. In Aa.Vv., Savoir, Faire, Espérer. Les limites de la raison. Bruxelles: Pu-blications des Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 207–228.
Ricoeur, P. (1983-1985). Temps et récit, t. 1-3. Paris: Seuil.
Ricoeur, P. (1994). Philosophies critiques de l’histoire: recherche, ex-plication, écriture. In G. Floistad (ed.), Philosophical Problems Today, Vol. 1. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 139–201.
Ricoeur, P. (1998). La marque du passé. In Revue de métaphysique et de morale I, 7–31.
Ricoeur, P. (2000). L’écriture de l’histoire et la représentation du pas-sé. In Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 55(4), 731–747.
Ricoeur, P. (2002). La mémoire : approches historiennes, approche philosophique. Le Débat 5, 41–61.
Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. by C. Blamey - D. Pellauer, Chicago / London: Chicago University Press.
Copyrights for articles published in Critical Hermeneutics are retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal.
Critical Hermeneutics is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY 3.0
. With the licence CC-BY, authors retain the copyright, allowing anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy the contribution (edited version), on condition that credit is properly attributed to its author and that Critical Hermeneutics is mentioned as its first venue of publication.
