Adam Graves

In examining what he calls “a Freudian hermeneutics of suspicion,” Adam Graves explains that Ricoeur uses Freud’s work to undermine certain aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy. Ricoeur claims that practical reason - contrary to what Kant proposes - is not pure and a priori, but has its roots in our human desires. However, according to Graves, Ricoeur’s Freudian critique of Kant misses its mark since Kantian ethics (and the normativity that underpins it) already addresses similar suspicions about practical reason. According to Graves, it is then possible to base the mediation between desire and normativity on a broad conception of action in Kant.

The author examines how the normative account of freedom might be profitably supplemented by a theory of narrative configuration, according to which narrating action is concomitant with the formation of the identity of a character. A normative-narrative conception of freedom would require neither an abandonment of the basic intuitions underlying our practices of moral responsibility nor a commitment to the untenable metaphysics of the causa sui. Freedom, according to this account, is something of an achievement of narrative self-understanding. By recounting our own story, by owning up to our past, by claiming responsibility for past actions, we not only come to better understand ourselves, but in some sense we even reclaim the possibility of becoming—within the narrative of our lives—our own beginning.

This paper begins by arguing that Jean-Luc Marion’s desire to maintain the philosophical rigor of his analysis of revelation has led him to mischaracterizerevelation as a purely formal phenomenon devoid of any determinate content. The majority of the paper is devoted to showing that the approach to revelation off ered by Paul Ricœur—whose treatment of the phenomenon assumes all of the risks of a thinking exposed to its own historicity—represents an important and all-too-often ignored counterpoint to the prevailing methodological orientation among those associated with the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. The paper contrasts the prevailing methods concerned with uncovering fundamental or “originary” structures with a “hermeneutical” approach to revelation, concerned with the productive imagination and the effective nature of texts.