A Filosofia Social de Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

Although Ricoeur never wrote any specific book thematically grounding a project
 worthy of being called a “social philosophy”, we can still find sparse
 elements of such a project in his writings. Consequently, it is not
 impossible to hermeneutically reconstruct those elements in order
 to put forward something akin to a “Ricoeurian social philosophy”.
 That philosophy will have the intersubjective constitution of human
 beings – simultaneously passive and active, being affected
 by alterity and dependent on patterns of recognition in order to
 be successfully constituted in a healthy manner – as its starting
 point, while its goal will be the constitution of just social institutions
 allowing for a better realization of the principle of freedom.
 Bearing that utopian and yet mobilizing ideal in mind, this philosophy
 will also serve as the yardstick with which we can detect pathological
 phenomena – the so‑called
 social pathologies famously depicted
 by Critical Theorists – of social reality, and therefore criticize them.
 This paper partially reconstructs this “Ricoeurian social philosophy”
 and presents some of the social phenomena that it enables us to assess
 and criticize: the critique of ideologies by utopias, the critique of
 unjust institutions or the analysis of the phenomena of social crises.

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