Abstract

If the "transcendental turn" has awakened us to the essential role that the subject plays in the constitution of the objects of experience, it has at the same time weakened our sense of the alterity of being. There is a growing tendency in contemporary philosophy to stress the creative, world-making capacity of the subject to such a great extent that being becomes reduced to mere grist for our transcendental mills. This stress on the radical productivity of language in constituting a world ultimately leads some philosophers to embrace a kind of Nietzschean perspectivalism in which there is no one real world but only a plurality of heterogeneous and incommensurable interpretations without any common core. ;In my dissertation, I argue that Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic ontology provides a much needed correction to this excessive turn toward the subject. While agreeing that our grasp of reality is always mediated by language, history, and culture, Ricoeur nonetheless insists that language exists not for its own glory but for the sake of bringing to expression an experience of being. By introducing an interpretive or hermeneutic dimension into his approach to the transcendental properties of being, Ricoeur is able to reinterpret the polysemic conception of being in Plato and Aristotle in light of human historicity and linguisticality, and thereby combine the modern appreciation for the work of transcendental legislation with the classical respect for the unity and alterity of being. ;Three themes provide the focus for my study of Ricoeur's ontology: the polysemy of being, being in the sense of actuality and potentiality, and the alterity of being. I examine how Ricoeur rethinks the traditional doctrine of the many senses of being in light of the hermeneutic character of experience, how Ricoeur retrieves a sense of being as actuality and potentiality in order to understand the relationship between the acting self and its world, and finally how Ricoeur integrates the modern discovery of subjectivity with the classical understanding of the unity and alterity of being