Living metaphor

pp. 103-113

in: Domenico Jervolino, The cogito and hermeneutics, Berlin, Springer, 1990

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur's work on metaphor¹ is an illuminating example of how the sciences and philosophy of language can relate in a correct and productive way, without either field encroaching on the autonomy of the other or any breakdown in communication taking place among different disciplines. What emerges clearly in Ricoeur's work is that the philosophical approach to language offers the specific possibility of traversing the whole domain of semiology in order to go beyond signs into the heart of the relation between language and reality, thus allowing the ancient philosophical problem of truth to be posed in new forms. But this result can only be obtained at the expense of a journey which is both semiological and philosophical, a long route, to use Ricoeur's favorite expression, moving from rhetoric through semantics to hermeneutics.