Esteban Lythgoe

In this paper, I attempt to show the evolution of the concept of testimony in PaulRicoeur’s writing. In the paper “Herméneutique du témoignage” given at theConference of Castelli in 1972 Ricoeur defined “testimony” in legal terms, as atestimony given in the frame of a dispute. In contrast, in “La Mémoire, l’Histoire,l’Oublie”1Ricoeur split testimony from the legal frame and characterized it as adialogical “natural institution.” My first hypothesis is that, even though in the1972 conference he recognized the legal origin of testimony, his definition is notquite the standard one. In order to establish this hypothesis, I will compareRicoeur’s definition with C.A.J. Coady’s understanding of the term to showwhere the differences are and explore the implications of each. Next, I willdiscuss the limitations of the legal definition, and how the concept of testimonywas changed in order to overcome them. I will then show how Ricoeur’s conceptof testimony works in MHO so as to associate memory with history. Finally, Iwill focus on Ricoeur’s revised notion of testimony in his last book Parcours dela reconnaissance, and argue that some of the changes in the definition had anargumentative and not a phenomenological reason

Varios intérpretes han reconocido la importancia de la imaginación productiva en la obra de Ricœur, aunque la mayoría de ellos ha dedicado sus investigaciones a las obras del filósofo francés de las décadas de los setenta y ochenta. En lo que sigue quisiera sostener que la imaginación también tiene un papel central en La memoria, la historia, el olvido. Mi hipótesis es que esta facultad articula los distintos momentos de esta obra, fundamentalmente los relacionados con la fenomenología de la memoria y la epistemología de la historia. Asimismo quisiera relativizar parcialmente la tesis de que a partir de Tiempo y narración Ricœur enfatiza el carácter sintético de la imaginación, y así mostraré que en la obra que abordo hay una fuerte presencia de la función libre. Several interpreters have recognized the importance of productive imagination in Ricœur's work, but most of them have focused their research on his works of the 1970s and 1980s. I want to argue that imagination has also a central role in Memory, History, Forgetting. My hypothesis is that this notion articulates the different moments of the work, mainly those related to phenomenology of memory and epistemology of history. I also wish to relativize the argument that after Time and Narrative Ricœur emphasized synthetic imagination, by showing the presence of free imagination in Memory, History, Forgetting