Critical Hermeneutics and the Paradigm of the Text

The aim of this paper is to reconsider Paul Ricœur’s philosophy under the perspective of a critical hermeneutics understood as a general methodology which is able to work in the philosophical field as well as in the fields of the social and the human sciences. Indeed, critical hermeneutics expresses at once a philosophical approach and a methodological model. The differentiation of knowledge in the contemporary sciences has provoked a great increase in complexity. In addition, some problematic disciplines, like psychoanalysis, sociology and history have not found a unified methodological and epistemological structure revealing an objective, scientific, limitation. The fragmentation and compartmentalisation of all researches and the scientific limitation of the human and social sciences is a fact. Philosophy may play a strategic, epistemological and procedural role of mediation thanks to its vast and diverse traditions, its rich vocabulary, and its varied, multileveled, approach.