Paul MARINESCU — Ricœur’s Hermeneutics of History. Questioning the Riddle of the Past

This book investigates the importance of Ricœur’s hermeneutics of history and the role it plays in the recent philosophical reflections and debates on the past and its relationship to the present. The studies included here are primarily focused on Ricœur’s constant reluctance towards a complete and totalizing understanding of the meaning of history and his interest in addressing instead issues related to the epistemology of history. The goal of these investigations is to show that Ricœur relentlessly seeks—throughout his main works on history, History and Truth (1955), Time and Narrative (1983-85), Memory, History, Forgetting (2000)—to reopen questions related to the epistemology of historiographical operations, while taking care to place his inquiry within the horizon of our existential finitude. But the author also considers the connections between the hermeneutics of history and the theory of translation, as they were elaborated upon, outlined, even suggested by Ricœur. The ultimate objective is thus to establish whether the “translation of the past” is possible and if this phenomenon could lay the basis for a hermeneutics of history.