Echoes of the religious in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: the poetics of revelation

Abstract

Even though Paul Ricoeur was always careful to distinguish between philosophical and religious thought, striving never to confuse them, we may say that he has paid a considerable attention to the religious phenomenon in his work. As such, the horizon of faith appears as the main theme of his concerns regarding the hermeneutics of the religious. To this philosopher, the problem of interpreting the religious language cannot vanish from the philosophical horizon, even if philosophical discourse has to maintain its own autonomy. We can therefore identify, in the context of a philosophical investigation, the specific character of religious language. Considering that every religious experience is articulated in a given language, it is the poetic and narrative dimension of the Christian religion that Ricoeur chooses to analyse, namely from the angle of the truth‑revelation problem.