Francesca D'Alessandris

Is it possible that children experience something we could judge as the sublime? Some pivotal conjectures have been elicited to positively answer these questions; however, this general topic still stands in need of fuller theoretical and empirical insights. Since taking up this challenge may have important implications in the ever-expanding field of aesthetic education, in this article I will give a philosophical account of the experience of the sublime in 8-10 children, identifying both its plau- sible components and its markers, which opens up future empirical inquiries.

From Tragic Evil to Recounted Evil: Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Action Between Freud and Nabert. This contribution is based on the hypothesis that Ricoeur’s cross-reading of Freud and Nabert is originally motivated by his reflection on evil, and furthermore that it leads Ricoeur to the elaboration of his ethics of the “wounded Cogito.” This chapter argues, firstly, that the centrality given by Ricoeur to the tragic experience of guilt excludes by principle the idea, envisaged by Nabert, of a complete appropriation of the original act of consciousness. It will then show that Ricoeur, starting from the awareness of the inexplicability of the primitive fall of man, turns to psychoanalysis as a practice that nevertheless allows to give meaning to the singular and historical experience of evil, specifically through a hermeneutic that, by exploiting the narrative function, allows an ethical evaluation of action. The Symbolism of Evil thus led Ricoeur to write Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation by way of a prior re-evaluation of the limits of Jean Nabert’s rationalism, a re-evaluation by which we can give a new meaning, both reflexive and ethical, to the famous Freudian adage: “Where there was It, there must come I.”

In this article, we argue that Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of spaces and the aesthetics vision of the landscape as a performance, based on the contemporary theories of Erika Fischer-Lichte, can integrate each other through the mediation of Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of the a priori. In particular, we will show how the representations and the hermeneutics of a landscape as a peculiar “text” are essentially connected with its the pre-reflective experience, which, being made possible by the activation of precise material – and therefore historical and cultural – a priori, can be thus translated into images and words. By intertwining hermeneutics, phenomenology, and performative esthetics we will provide with a non-reductive philosophical description of a landscape, i.e., a definition that does not neglect the aspects of it suggested by its linguistic pre-comprehension and artistic representations.

The political role of architecture in urban space design is still a significant philosophical issue. Starting from the assumption that cities can actually be understood as material texts, Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has described the architecture as a creative mimesis of space. Textual hermeneutics applied to architecture, if crossed with Ricoeur’s reading of ideology and utopia, allows today to qualify the figure of the architect as a critical and transformative narrator of the urban dimension, and, thus, to identify his political task in the imaginative effort of thinking a utopian elsewhere which is, at the same time, rooted in cultural and historical identities of designed places.

The issue of personal identity has been connected since its first formulation, in the modern age, to the one is persistence of self in time. The most recent hypothesis of a narrative identity of person, specifically the one given by Paul Ricœur, starts from this same assumption. In this article, we will reformulate the link between person and narrative from the perspective of the category of space. The transcendental connection between time and space and the essential corporeity of the person will be the starting point for a theory of the act of reading as a construction of ipseity. This latter exhibits its singularity throughout personal understanding of places, by inhabiting a shared space which is, for its part, an architectural material narrative.

In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricœur does not provide us with a clear definition of collective memory. In this article, we will try to show how it could nevertheless be described, based on the same text, as the capacity for recognition, by way of reciprocal attribution, memories that are engraved in temporal spaces and are shared with our neighbors and, through them, with strangers. To verify this hypothesis, we will analyse Ricœur’s reflection on architecture as public memory’s engraving into space, presented for the first time in the text “Architecture et narrativité.” Lastly, we will consider imagination and bodily memory, i.e. habit emanating from the act of inhabiting, as the conditions of possibility for the crystallization of memories in shared places.