This volume makes available for the first time an encounter between Ricoeur and Castoriadis on questions of human creation, social imaginaries, history, and the imagination to an English speaking audience. As such it represents a highly significant resource for scholars, and a lively introduction to each of their thought for newcomers.

This volume makes available for the first time an encounter between Ricoeur and Castoriadis on questions of human creation, social imaginaries, history, and the imagination to an English speaking audience. As such it represents a highly significant resource for scholars, and a lively introduction to each of their thought for newcomers.

This book develops an examination and critique of human extinction as a result of the ‘next pandemic’ and turns attention towards the role of pandemic catastrophe in the renegotiation of what it means to be human. Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the ‘next pandemic’ stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species, as from an expectation of the loss of mastery over human/non-humanl relations. Christos Lynteris employs the notion of the ‘pandemic imaginary’ in order to understand the way in which pandemic-borne human extinction refashions our understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The book challenges us to think how cosmological, aesthetic, ontological and political aspects of pandemic catastrophe are intertwined. The chapters examine the vital entanglement of epidemiological studies, popular culture, modes of scientific visualisation, and pandemic preparedness campaigns. This volume will be relevant for scholars and advanced students of anthropology as well as global health, and for many others interested in catastrophe, the ‘end of the world’ and the (post)apocalyptic.

"When Paul Ricoeur died in 2005, the New York Times described him as "one of the most eminent philosophers of the twentieth century." In his lifetime, Ricoeur published influential works on language, memory, identity, and history, creating an innovative blend of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Despite his major interest in the imagination, however, he never wrote a complete text on the topic. The present volume, Lectures on Imagination, fills this gap, providing an indispensable resource for philosophically inclined readers from all backgrounds. Over the course of these lectures, Ricoeur examines classical and contemporary philosophical theories of imagination, ranging from thinkers such as Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant to Husserl, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Ryle. He argues that, with few exceptions, Western philosophy has focused on reproductive rather than productive imagination, thus diminishing the creative capacity of the human mind. For Ricoeur, productive imagination is a form of fiction-a new dimension of reality generated by the human mind. His theory has far-reaching implications. In all domains, we are not restricted by existing structures or institutions, because the productive imagination has the power to break through and transform our sense of our own horizons"--

Written by members of the Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective, these programmatic essays showcase new critical interventions in understandings of social imaginaries and the human condition. They include a new comparative approach to theorizing Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor; the rethinking of the creative imagination in relation to common sense; analyses of political imaginaries in neoliberal and constitutional contexts from perspectives drawing on Gauchet and Lefort; and the taking up questions of historical continuity and discontinuity in civilizational worlds. In addressing pressing questions concerning social imaginaries, the book advances the field as a whole. The book includes a Foreword by George H. Taylor. This book is a must-read for all scholars interested in social and political imaginaries and will appeal to researchers and graduate students working across a wide variety of disciplines in the human sciences.

This book offers a unique account of the role imagination plays in advancing the course of freedom’s actualization. It draws on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology of the capable human being as the staging ground for an extended inquiry into the challenges of making freedom a reality within the history of humankind. This book locates the abilities we exercise as capable human beings at the heart of a sustained analysis and reflection on the place of the idea of justice in a hermeneutics for which every expectation regarding rights, liberties, and opportunities must be a hope for humanity as a whole. The vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricoeur figures in a philosophy of the will provides an initial touchstone for a hermeneutics of liberation rooted in a philosophical anthropology for which the pathétique of human misery is its non- or pre-philosophical source. By setting the idea of the humanity in each of us against the backdrop of the necessity of preserving the tension between the space of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations, the book identifies the ethical and political dimensions of the idea of justice’s federating force with the imperative of respect. Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics.

Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur: Between Fragility and Hope creates a dialogue between Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy and the interpretation of human ritual practices, especially as such practices are manifested within the context of Christian liturgy. In the first part of the book, Christina M. Gschwandtner shows that Ricœur’s account of religion would be deepened if it were to take into account not only the biblical texts but also forms of liturgical expression and ritual actions. She challenges Ricœur’s early reading of the symbol and second naïveté, broadens his interpretation of biblical texts and faith to consider religious actions more fully, and suggests that ritual can enhance human capacities. The second part of the book employs Ricœur’s hermeneutics in order to shed light on the analysis of liturgy, demonstrating that his accounts of truth, of the world of the text, of religious language, of the imagination, and of the formation of identity are all eminently applicable to liturgical experience. Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur shows that one of the most significant themes in Ricœur’s work—the tension between fragility and hope—is especially helpful for understanding what liturgy does and how it functions. Seeing how liturgy and ritual configure fragility and hope also enriches Ricœur’s account of the role and function of religion in human experience.

In this vibrant debate with intellectuals influenced by Marcel Mauss, including Alain Caillé and Chantal Mouffe, the incisive Greek-French activist and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis addresses the challenge of critical thinking in an international context. The first half explores the tradition of radical self-critique and the prospect of affirming its value in a non-ethnocentric way. While defending ancient Greek contributions to the Western tradition of radical self-critique — including the practice of “relativizing” one's own culture, of engaging in philosophical interrogation, and of establishing democratic institutions — Castoriadis is challenged to explore the trans-contextual features of any self-critical, or “autonomous,” social institution. In the second half Castoriadis offers a penetrating critique of representative democracy, and the discussion makes important strides toward a new conception of direct democracy, of political education, and of the institutional prerequisites for the continuation of radical self-critique in politics and philosophy.

This innovative collection traces the heretical development of productive imagination in post-Kantian philosophy. The book offers an original study that comprises unprecedented investigations into the kinaesthetic, pre-linguistic, poetic, historical, artistic, social and political dimensions of the productive power of imagination.

By engaging with the notions of indeterminacy and embodiment within the writings of Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte and Cornelius Castoriadis, this book addresses and brings to the fore the significance of the creative imagination as an ontological source of human creation. Principally inspired by Castoriadis’ revolutionary elucidation of the imagination and the imaginary, this book actively contributes to this neglected line of enquiry by exposing deep lines of continuity and rupture both within and between the writings of Kant, Fichte, and Castoriadis. Beginning with Kant’s hesitation in describing the productive imagination as a creative and embodied power of the soul, this book traces these lines of continuity and rupture through Fichte’s innovative depiction of the creative imagination as an ontological power of creation and through Castoriadis’ radical extension of this idea into the social-historical realm. Given the notions of indeterminacy and embodiment actively inform these lines of continuity and of rupture, this book contributes to the landscape of thinking by proposing the creative imagination must be envisaged an embodied power of the human soul.