Patrick Bourgeois

This article on mystery and hope at the boundary of reason in the postmodern situation responds to the challenge of postmodern thinking to philosophyby a recourse to the works of Gabriel Marcel and his best disciple, Paul Ricoeur. It develops along the lines of their interpretation of hope as a central phenomenon in human experience and existence, thus shedding light on the philosophical enterprise for the future. It is our purpose to dwell briefly on this postmodern challenge and then, incorporating its positive contribution, to present theirs as an alternative philosophy at the boundary of reason.

Tattam's study of the work of Gabriel Marcel attempts to come to grips with Marcel's thought without a prejudice of identifying him as a Christian existentialist or as a contemporary French existentialist. It is an attempt to come to grips with Marcel's work in relation to the nature of philosophy, especially as he conceives it. This book shows that the creative work of Marcel can shed light on our culture and its future because of the renewed relevance and importance of his works to the postmodern situation. For, with his view of existence as mystery approached in a second reflection, Marcel has turned toward its fullness that eludes, and is irreducible to, first reflection, and as such manifests elements shared with the viable elements of postmodernism. Yet, the need for a renewal of his call to a sense of being becomes more acute in light of the serious danger of suppression of this very sense in postmodernity. It is clear that the loss of this sense of being today in postmodern reductionism is in a way more threatening than in Marcel's own time.

Not only does peirce's theory of meaning as dispositional or as habit contain parallels with merleau-ponty's view of meaning in the structure of human behavior, but also both peirce and merleau-ponty alike attack reductivistic theories of perception. within this context, the present paper focuses on the use of kantian schemata in the philosophies of peirce and merleau-ponty, but to the extent that such incorporations are consistent with trends in pragmatism and phenomenology in general, it will reveal points of encounter not just between peirce and merleau-ponty but between pragmatism and phenomenology in general.

My aim in this memorial paper is to recall two essential Ricoeurean themes that underlie his entire philosophical orientation and that respond well to specific challenges today from post-modern deconstruction. At question is whether Ricoeur's account of sign in language and the living present in time can adequately respond to and meet the recent challenge from postmodern deconstruction, which radically challenges the very root of his phenomenological and hermeneutic orientation: the priority of the semantic in language and the priority of the living present. Although Ricoeur and Derrida will be seen to address the same problems of decentering consciousness, their accounts, although agreeing on important issues, quickly become mutually exclusive and deconstruction becomes a challenge to Ricoeurean hermeneutics. I will turn first to the postmodern deconstruction of Jacques Derrida before turning to Ricoeur's response with a more viable view of language, sense, and lived time.

While naturalism is used in positive senses by the tradition of analytical philosophy, with Ludwig Wittgenstein its best example, and by the tradition of phenomenology, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty its best exemplar, it also has an extremely negative sense on both of these fronts. Hence, both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein in their basic thrusts adamantly reject reductionistic naturalism. Although Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology rejects the naturalism Husserl rejects, he early on found a place for the “truth of naturalism.” In a parallel way, Wittgenstein accepts a certain positive sense of naturalism, while rejecting Quine’s kind of naturalism. It is the aim of this paper to investigate the common ground in the views of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty regarding the naturalism that they each espouse and that which they each reject.