Être essence et substance chez Platon et Aristote

by Paul Ricœur

Le dos du livre dit ceci:"Professé d'abord et polycopié à Strasbourg dès 1953 puis devenu "Cours de Sorbonne" polycopié en 1957, ce Cours interprète avec rigueur le sens des trois mots du titre: "être", "essence" et "substance" - les concepts fondamentaux de la métaphysique occidentale. Ils représentent, comme tels, un progrès considérable de la raison conceptuelle par rapport aux Présocratiques, qui parlaient encore des "éléments". Par la suite, ils eurent une importance exceptionnelle dans l'histoire de la philosophie, bien au-delà de la scolastique médiévale et de la métaphysique classique, puisqu'au XXe siècle Heidegger et d'autres se mesurent encore et toujours à eux. Comment Platon puis Aristote les pensent-ils? Quel sens leur donnent-ils? Outre l'intérêt intrinsèque du commentaire, très fouillé et très appuyé sur les textes, on note les connexions et les inversions que Ricoeur établit au sein des deux philosophies et entre elles, et son insistance, déjà, sur le langage. Il met aussi en relief des évolutions surprenantes: un second Platon a critiqué un premier Platon (celui des idées), et un second Aristote a critiqué Platon en le simplifiant et même en le caricaturant."

Genres: Philosophy

345 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. His books include a multi-volume project on the philosophy of the will: Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950, Eng. tr. 1966), Fallible Man (1960, Eng. tr. 1967), and The Symbolism of Evil (1960, Eng. tr. 1970); a major study of Freud: Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965, Eng. tr. 1970); The Rule of Metaphor (1975, Eng. tr. 1977); Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976); the three-volume Time and Narrative (1983-85, Eng. tr. 1984–88); Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986); the published version of his Gifford lectures: Oneself as Another (1990, Eng. tr. 1992); Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, Eng. tr. 2004); and The Course of Recognition (2004, Eng. tr. 2005). In addition to his books, Ricoeur published more than 500 essays, many of which appear in collections in English: History and Truth (1955, Eng. tr. 1965); Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (1967); The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1969, Eng. tr. 1974); Political and Social Essays (1974); Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980); Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981); From Text to Action (1986, Eng. tr. 1991); Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (1995); The Just (1995, Eng. tr. 2000); On Translation (2004, Eng. tr. 2004); and Reflections on the Just (2001, Eng. tr. 2007).

The major theme that unites his writings is that of a philosophical anthropology. This anthropology, which Ricoeur came to call an anthropology of the “capable human being,” aims to give an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives. Though the accent is always on the possibility of understanding the self as an agent responsible for its actions, Ricoeur consistently rejects any claim that the self is immediately transparent to itself or fully master of itself. Self-knowledge only comes through our relation to the world and our life with and among others in that world.

In the course of developing his anthropology, Ricoeur made a major methodological shift. His writings prior to 1960 were in the tradition of existential phenomenology. But during the 1960s Ricoeur concluded that properly to study human reality he had to combine phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. For this hermeneutic phenomenology, whatever is intelligible is accessible to us in and through language and all deployments of language call for interpretation. Accordingly, “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms” (Oneself as Another, 15, translation corrected). This hermeneutic or linguistic turn did not require him to disavow the basic results of his earlier investigations. It did, however, lead him not only to revisit them but also to see more clearly their implications.

Reviews

[Fabrizio Valenza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Come sempre, esemplare è la chiarezza di Ricœur nel porre, analizzare e risolvere le grandi questioni. Nella fattispecie, per chi volesse capire il pensiero di Platone e di Aristotele circa l'essere e gli enti, e lo statuto della realtà (che in fin dei conti è la questione fondamentale e di partenza per ogni filosofia occidentale), questo libro è il più adatto. Necessita solo di un poco di conoscenze previe.

[Ali Ziraoui]

هراء يتخيره المركز الوطني للترجمة بتونس قصد ترجمته و كأنه فتح فكري مبين و من مجلى من مجالي الانحطاط العلمي و الفكري الذي نتردى فيه