Paul Ricœur shared Emmanuel Mounier’s personalist and communitarian ideal of a universal community, which ensures that every human being has access to the conditions for self-development as a person. Whereas Mounier talks about communication as the structure of personhood that summons us towards the gradual enlargement of the community, Ricœur’s reflections on translation provide a missing link by referring, not just to the human capacity to communicate, but more specifically, to our capacity to translate and the implied ethics (...) of linguistic hospitality. This allowed him to show that what enables us to enlarge the circle of brotherhood is the capacity to gradually settle in the world of the other and to welcome the other into one’s own world. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. In this short and accessible book, he turns to a topic at the heart of much of his work: What is translation and why is it so important? Reminding us that The Bible, the Koran, the Torah and the works of the great philosophers are often only ever read in translation, Ricoeur reminds us that translation not only spreads knowledge but can change its very meaning. In spite (...) of these risk, he argues that in a climate of ethnic and religious conflict, the art and ethics of translation are invaluable. Drawing on interesting examples such as the translation of early Greek philosophy during the Renaissance, the poetry of Paul Celan and the work of Hannah Arendt, he reflects not only on the challenges of translating one language into another but how one community speaks to another. Throughout, Ricoeur shows how to move through life is to navigate a world that requires translation itself. Paul Ricoeur died in 2005. He was one of the great contemporary French philosophers and a leading figure in hermeneutics, psychoanalytic thought, literary theory and religion. His many books include Freud and Philosophy and Time and Narrative. (shrink)

The 4th volume of “Manuscripts and Speeches” by the prominent contemporary thinker Paul Ricoeur (1913‑2005) contains works discussing one of his central themes — the problem of a common existence of men considered from the point of view of politics, economics, power, law, culture, morality, and ethics. At the same time, the French thinker specifically highlights and discusses such burning problems of modern life as mutual recognition, the fragility of human existence and earthly civilization in general, tolerance, care, justice, responsibility (...) for the future of humanity, for the very idea of man. In a number of works, Ricoeur expresses his views on the possible future of Europe — on its new ethos overcoming the boundaries and structures of national states, on the combination of their “identity” and “otherness” at the global level. Translation from one language to another as a kind of a priori communication, exchange of memory as a preliminary transfer to a different cultural environment, forgiveness that stems from the suffering of others and raises the question of the burden of debt, — all this is being considered as a models of integration. Originally presented at philosophical congresses and symposia, as well as qua journal publications, the highlighted problems were fundamentally studied by the philosopher in his works “History and Truth” (1955), “Oneself as Another” (1990), “Ethics and Responsibility” (1994), “The Just” (vols. 1, 2 — 1995, 2001), “Ideology and Utopia” (1997), “Memory, History, Oblivion” (2000), “The Way of Recognition” (2004). The book “Paul Ricoeur. Politics, Economics and Society. Manuscripts and Speeches 4” is addressed to philosophers, cultural and political scientists and scholars representing different branches of humanitarian studies, as well as to readers interested in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Ricoeur has written about translation as an ethical paradigm. Translation from one language to another, and within one’s own language, provides both a metaphor and a real mechanism for explaining oneself to the other. Attempting and failing to achieve symmetry between two languages is a manifestation of the asymmetry inherent in human relationships. If actively pursued, translation can show us how to forgive other people for being different from us and thus serves as a paradigm for tolerance. In full acceptance (...) that this will be impossible, Ricoeur uses the model of translation as a way of understanding European integration, with three aspects: translation, shared narrative and shared forgiveness of Europe’s history. These models provide a strong statement about tolerance and become even more significant through their conversation with the negativity that suffuses them. He draws on his knowledge of psychoanalysis to explain that the translator suffers through remembering and through mourning the loss of perfection; there must be acknowledgement of deficiency. This acceptance of imperfection and of limits to success is a key element in Ricoeur’s philosophy and is explored from the 1950s onwards in his study of negativity; denied by phenomenology and explored by Hegel. Negation is vital for understanding the world (this word means this, not that), but it can preclude us from access to meaning when it becomes negativity (this word has no meaning because it is different). Translation can provide the bridge to span the tension between the pathology of denial and different interpretations, and projection of evil into others, which I believe is at the heart of the perceived incompatibilities between Islam and the West. There is a political urgency to this enterprise, given the ‘othering’ of the Muslim world that has replaced the Cold War dichotomies between Communist as ‘other’ and the capitalist world. References to the Muslim as the current ‘other’ will be part of my discussion. As well as seeking to understand Ricoeur’s model of translation, we will examine whether his model works in a world where many speak no Arabic, Urdu or Farsi, or indeed whether it has any relevance for people who do not translate from one language to another. (shrink)

The paper examines some philosophical aspects of translation as a metaphor for education—a metaphor that avoids the closure of final definitions, in favour of an ongoing and tentative process of interpretation and revision. Translation, it is argued, is a complex process involving language, within and among cultures, and in the exercise of power. Drawing on Foucault's analysis of power, Nietzschean contingency, and the inversion of meaning that characterises the work of Heidegger and Derrida, the paper points towards Ricoeur's notion of (...) linguistic hospitality as the ethical dimension to the inevitably inadequate representation of the ‘other’. In this exploration, translation is posited as a creative and interpretive act—involving neither image nor copy, but poetic transposition.The power of language emerges in the close association between power and knowledge, in which the ability to define what is real generates the realm of future possibilities. From a Foucauldian perspective, language functions as a creative strategic relation—a form of power that structures the field of other possible actions. It is through the mediation of translation, the paper argues, that language communicates, leaving us with a world of difference (i.e. ‘lost in translation’), as both our curse and our blessing as part of the human condition and as part of our ethical endeavour as educators. The contingent and arbitrary nature of language problematises what appears natural and necessary, generating the possibility of creative dialogue. (shrink)

At the time of his death in 2005, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. In more than half a century of writing about the essential questions of human life, Ricoeur’s thought encompassed a vast range of wisdom and experience, and he made landmark contributions that would go on to influence later scholars in such areas as phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and theology. Toward the end of his life, Ricoeur began to focus directly (...) on ethical questions that he feared had been overshadowed by his other work; the result was a two-volume collection of essays on justice and the law. The University of Chicago Press published the English translation of the first volume, The Just, to great acclaim in 2000. Now this translation of the second volume, Reflections on the Just, completes the set and makes available to readers the whole of Ricoeur’s meditations on the concept. Consisting of fifteen thematically organized essays, Reflections on the Just continues and expands on the work Ricoeur began in with his “little ethics” in Oneself as Another and The Just. In the preface, he considers what revisions he would make were he to start over and how that is reflected in these essays. The opening part brings phenomenology to bear on ethics; the second group of essays comprises shorter, occasional pieces considering the concept of justice in the works of other philosophers, including Max Weber and Charles Taylor. The final part turns to the specific domains of medicine and the law, examining how concepts of right and justice operate in those realms. Cogent, deeply considered, and fully engaged with the realities of the contemporary world, Reflections on the Just is an essential work for understanding the development of Ricoeur’s thought in his final years. (shrink)

Translation and Hermeneutic PhenomenologyThe problem of translation has been reflected since the antiquity but it became a special field of research only later within the "traductorolgie" and the translation studies. Applying Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology, the author suggests that translation in the narrow sense is felt also at the level of translation in a broader sense, that is, of mutual understanding within the same linguistic community; thus, it could serve as a model par excellence for the European community. (...) In accordance of Paul Ricoeur's conception of "originary affirmation" and language hospitality, he argues that translation has not only ethical but also political implications: Matured by its century-long history of conflicts and wars, Europe is called to become a translator and mediator of the world and to promote the encounter between cultures, religions and nations with an active peace-policy, especially in the Mediterranean region and the Balkans. (shrink)

In an intentionally provocative essay published in the journal Esprit (January, 1983) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, I ventured the following slogan: “Death to personalism; long live the person!” I was attempting to suggest that Mounier's formulation of personalism was, as he himself readily admitted, connected with a certain cultural and philosophical constellation which is no longer ours today: existentialism and Marxism are no longer the only opponents. They are no longer even opponents at all, against which personalism (...) would be required to define itself, at the risk of becoming one or another system or `ism'. I concluded my essay with the following citation from Mounier's Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme?: “We are witnessing [...] the first meanderings of a cyclical course where the explorations pursued to exhaustion along one path are are given up only to be rediscovered farther on, enriched by this forgetting and by the discoveries for which it cleared a path” (p. 11). In addition, I wanted to say that the person is still the most appropriate term to designate those investigations for which neither the term `con-sciousness', nor `subject', nor `individual' really apply, for the various reasons that I invoked at the time. I would like to discuss some of those investigations here, beyond the point reached in that essay, where I restricted myself to defining the person by an attitude in Eric Weil's sense, or as one would say in hermeneutics, by the everyday understanding that we have of it. Following Paul Landsberg, I used the criteria of crisis and commitment, adding to the latter certain corollaries such as fidelity over time to a higher cause, and acceptance of alterity and difference within personal identity. Now I would like to make use of contemporary investigations into language, action and narrative in order to provide the ethical constitution of the person with a substratum and roots, comparable to those explored by Emmanuel Mounier in Traité du Caractère. In this sense, the present study is an extension of Mounier's book. (shrink)

This special section on the later work of Paul Ricoeur is an attempt to examine the fruitfulness of that work for the social sciences. Of particular interest are his theorization and application of the notions of memory, identity, justice, and the relation to the other to political and ethical problems in the present. For example, his discourse links up the question of memory with that of justice and the problem of constructing new polities which can be considered just. To do (...) this, he introduces the concepts of ‘translation ethos’, the ‘exchange of memories’ and ‘non-forgetful forgiveness’ in order to examine the problem of the conditions for the imaginary construction of political entities in which dialogue can take place between interlocutors with different, maybe conflicting, interests and historical locations, and thus with different senses of belonging and identities. His philosophical apparatus is shown to have particular salience for the analysis of contemporary society. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 6, Page 813-832, July 2022. Ricoeur interpreted the work of compromise as a creative process to imagine a new world by projecting ourselves into other people. The challenge of compromise is to learn to tell our own story differently within the contours of a broader collective narrative, in compliance with the paradigm of translation. As such, Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise is at risk of highlighting the element of creation, which refers to the (...) social imagination of a shared vision of a better society, at the cost of recognition of the element of renunciation, which refers to the reciprocal shelving of ideas and desires that the other side considers to be truly intolerable. However, I argue that we can read a delicate connection between forgetting, forgoing and forgiving in Ricoeur’s thought. It is, then, the model of forgiveness, as part of the paradigm of translation, that gives due respect to the importance of renunciation through the emphasis on the unjustifiable, for which renunciation even cannot suffice. The ‘poetics of pardon’ brings creation and renunciation together and, by doing so, it highlights that compromise always remains an object of hope. (shrink)

This article compares Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida on the theme of translation and in particular the ethical implications of the different ways in which they approach the untranslatable. While Ricoeur’s account of translation as linguistic hospitality does offer a model for an ethical encounter with the other, I argue that this account does not go far enough. My central claim is that Ricoeur’s treatment of translation overemphasizes the movement of appropriation and integration. While it may not be his intention, (...) this emphasis could lead to a certain kind of complacency that would challenge the ethical claims Ricoeur makes in favour of translation as a paradigm. I propose to supplement Ricoeur’s hospitality with Derrida’s untranslatable, in order to create a situation of constant discomfort thereby guarding against ethical complacency. (shrink)

This book is a contribution to the research community towards thinking and reflecting on what Responsible Machine Translation really means. It was conceived as an open dialogue across disciplines, from philosophy to law, with the ultimate goal of providing a wide spectrum of topics to reflect on. It covers aspects related to the development of Machine translation systems, as well as its use in different scenarios, and the societal impact that it may have. This text appeals to students and (...) researchers in linguistics, translation, natural language processing, philosophy, and law as well as professionals working in these fields. (shrink)

This essay looks at how Ricoeur's hermeneutics functions as both philosophy of translation and philosophy as translation. It starts with a overview of Ricoeur's theories in the light of the history of the philosophy of translation and shows how he, following in the footsteps of Gadamer, understands the act of translation as an art of negotiating and mediating between Self and Other. It then goes on to explore the hermeneutic model of translation, advanced in Ricoeur's later work, in terms of (...) three main paradigms: linguistic, ontological and ethical. The essay concludes with a discussion of the crucial role played by translation in hospitality, pluralism and pardon. (shrink)

This dissertation is a constructive interpretation of the significance of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's work for ethical theory. It argues that Ricoeur provides a concept of moral meaning which addresses more adequately than major contemporary alternatives, particularly Hebermas, MacIntyre, and Levinas, the problem of moral pluralism. Specifically, moral meaning for Ricoeur is a dialectical term which mediates the teleological good and the deontological right of tradition-interpreting selves. It renders productive these two poles of moral life, one Aristotelian and the other (...) Kantian, in the formation of critical teleological goods which recognize each self's distinct otherness as an interpreter of their own moral being in the world even as their otherness is projected into provisional and imaginatively mediated aims in common. ;This thesis is made in four steps. First, the dissertation argues that any concept of tradition-constituted moral life implies a tradition-interpreting self capable of forming its given and plural background linguistically into appropriated meaning for its own being in the world. Second, this interpreting self is constituted ethically by a dialectical relation between on the one hand the narrative teleological goods it forms in time out of its interpretations of tradition, and on the other its deontological otherness as capable of forming these narrative goods for itself. Third, this dialectical relation is rendered productive in a critical teleology of moral meaning, which can be broken down into criteria of subjective conviction, interpersonal promising, and third-party community, each of which involves plural and other interpreting selves' mutual recognition. Fourth, this dialectical interpretive ethics is shown to be grounded in, and in the face of evil liberated by, its implied religious limits, specifically a dialectical economy of the gift expressed in the terms faith, love, and hope. (shrink)

Muslim ethics is cautiously engaging developments in neuroscience. In their encounters with developments in neuroscience such as brain death and functional magnetic resonance imaging procedures, Muslim ethicists might be on the cusp of spirited debates. Science and religion perform different kinds of work and ought not to be conflated. Cultural translation is central to negotiating the complex life worlds of religious communities, Muslims included. Cultural translation involves lived encounters with modernity and its byproduct, modern science. Serious ethical debate requires more (...) than just a mere instrumental encounter with science. A robust Muslim approach to neuroethics might require an emulsion of religion and neuroscience, thought and body, and body and soul. Yet one must anticipate that Muslim debates in neuroethics will be inflected with Muslim values, symbols and the discrete faith perspectives of this tradition with meanings that are specific to people who share this worldview and their concerns. (shrink)

In this chapter, we explore the issue of assisted dying for individuals with dementia at the nexus of ethics and law. We set out the basic medical realities of dementia and the available data about the desire for the option of assisted dying in the face of dementia. We then describe law and practice with respect to voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide in jurisdictions that permit at least some assisted dying. We conclude that, because of the peculiar ways in which (...) some of the features of dementia interact with specific legislative provisions, less access to assisted dying for persons with dementia can be realized through the legislation than might have been intended or expected. We then describe draft assisted dying legislation that is before the federal Parliament of Canada. We conclude that, because of the peculiar ways in which some of the features of dementia interact with specific legislative provisions, more access to assisted dying for persons with dementia would be realized, if the legislation was passed as drafted, than might be intended or expected. This exercise reveals that very careful attention needs to be paid to the features of dementia if drafting assisted dying legislation in order to actually achieve the desired law reform effect (whatever that might be). The interplay of common ethical rationales for permitting assisted dying (e.g., autonomy and alleviation of suffering) with common features of dementia (e.g., loss of competence before the terminal phase of the illness, loss of the capacity to communicate before the loss of the capacity to suffer) raises challenges for translating one’s ethical position on assisted dying for individuals with dementia into law. NB: This chapter is current up to 2015. (shrink)

We suggest that in the particular context of medical education, ethics can be considered in a similar way to other kinds of knowledge that are categorised and shaped by academics in the context of wider society. Moreover, the study of medical ethics education is translational in a manner loosely analogous to the study of medical education as adjunct to translational medicine. Some have suggested there is merit in the idea that much as translational research attempts to connect the laboratory scientist's (...) work to its implications for patient care, translational ethics focuses on bringing ethics scholarship into the sphere of personal and public action. We distinguish the term ‘translational ethics’ (the study of ethics being translated between academy, classroom and clinic) from other prominent definitions in the bioethics literature. To do this, we build off a notion of knowledge translation that focuses on the nonlinear movement of information that comes to professionals through multiple competing sources. We suggest that this knowledge, and particularly knowledge about ethics, becomes embodied by the individual. It is through a reflective practice that internally embedded ethics knowledge might be modified, and this work might be best carried out with a moral community that maintains a sense of practical wisdom. Applying this translational approach to the study of medical ethics education can be both academically relevant and practically useful. This view of translation can help bridge the evident, multidirectional relationships between research, education and performance. It might also create further opportunities to develop medical ethics education theory. (shrink)

In the Thirties, European personalism was an inspirational philosophical movement, with its birthplace in France, but with proponents and sympathizers in many other countries as well. Following the Second World War, Christian-Democratic politicians translated personalistic ideas into a political doctrine. Sometimes they still refer to personalism, but most often this reference is little more than a nostalgic salute. In the mainstream of Anglo-Saxon political philosophy, there are practically no references to personalistic philosophers. Is personalism exhausted as a philosophy or political (...) ideology? Yes and no. Paul Ricoeur, writing in Esprit , summed up the situation like this: “personalism is dead”, but he was careful to mention a “return of the person”. Indeed, no tradition or movement can simply perpetuate itself. It must, in order to continue making history, always abolish itself as a `system' so as to make room for the unsaid and the unthought in its tradition, an idea that Mounier also fervently believed in.To better situate the current discussion of personalism, however, it is necessary to look back to the original characteristics of personalism in the Thirties. As a response to the crisis provoked by the economic depression, failing democracy and existential uncertainty, there arose in France a number of `non-conformist movements' who labelled themselves personalistic. They did not constitute a unified movement with a commonly shared theory. It was rather a collection of `personalisms'. The article by the historian Christian Roy about the ecological personalism of Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul sheds interesting light on the multiple origins of French personalism, which is all too easily identified with the work of Maritain and Mounier alone. The work of Jacques Maritain, and the network of writers and artists surrounding him, undoubtedly remains a significant historical reference point when speaking of personalism.Another group was formed around Alexandre Marc who, along with Raymond Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, Daniel-Rops and Denis de Rougemont, kept the journal Ordre Nouveau alive for five years . They elaborated the idea of federalism as a way out of liberalism and totalitarianism. The most important and durable group, however, was formed by the movement and journal Esprit, founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier and George Izard. In order to stress the historical importance of Esprit, we are including here a testimony from 1982, written by Paulette Mounier, the founder's wife, in which she looks back on 50 years of Esprit. After the war, some new and related groups formed, such as Economy and Humanism around Louis-Joseph Lebret. An historical survey of the dissemination of personalistic centres and movements, not only in France but over all of Europe, would be material for a stimulating historical research project. In this issue, there will also be mention of, among others, the Prague personalism of Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel, the Leuven personalism of Louis Janssens, and the Polish personalism of Tadeusz Mazowiecki and others. But this list is far from exhaustive.What unites these various branches of the personalistic tree? It is a certain conception — or better perhaps: a certain attitude to the human person. Personalists were not seeking in the first instance a new academic theory about the person, but rather a practical philosophy of engagement. In the Thirties, quite a few personalists finished their university studies and chose not for an academic career but for non-conformist, demanding and vulnerable commitments with limited financial means. What motivated them? Primarily a strong sense that the time in which they were living was a turning point, one which was being ignored by the academic world. They interpreted the diverse economic, political and cultural crisis phenomena as symptoms of a more global crisis of civilization which demanded a response through radical change.Hence a certain rhetoric of a `new order', `spiritual revolution', `radical reform' and `rebirth'. But the rhetoric was supported by innovative ideas regarding political federalism, the third way economy and human alienation. The motivation for all this derived from a strong commitment to defend the concrete human person against the arrogance of systems, bureaucracies and ideologies, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of individualism — the reason why some personalists always qualified personalism as `communitarian'.In fact, much of what presents itself as communitarian philosophy today is a retrieval of personalistic themes from the Thirties applied to the current situation, a situation which is also interpreted by communitarians as a global cultural crisis. One should not forget, however, that alongside and sometimes opposed to the communitarian theme with its call to bring people back to their communitarian roots, personalists underscored the priority of metaphysics over politics, a theme that can likewise be found in the writings of personalistic dissidents in Eastern Europe. In the words of Mounier in Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme : “personalism combines faith in a certain human absolute with a progressive historical experience”.To what extent is personalistic thinking still relevant today? Its current relevance will be examined in three ways. In the first section, a number of articles are presented which illustrate the active presence of personalistic thought in the domains of politics and applied ethics. Vaclav Havel sent one of his recent addresses in which he links the theme of human rights with that of a world spirituality. His article is preceded by an introduction by Guido Van Heeswijck, situating Prague personalism.The need for an orientational philosophy of the person is not only manifest today in the political arena. Developments in economics, ecology, health care, the media, technology and in the world of the professions have had an extraordinarily large impact on the human person's lifeworld. The whole area of applied ethics requires a dynamic and orientational concept of the person. The contributions by Paul Schotsmans and Luk Bouckaert are seeking a personalistic point of departure for applied ethics. The more historical article by Christian Roy on ecological personalism has been included in the first section because it can be inspiring for an environmental ethics.The second section is more philosophical. To what extent does the `personalistic' conception of the person put forward in the Thirties still have any relevance today, following the waves of structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism? Paul Ricoeur's article, Approaching the Human Person — originally published in Esprit in 1990 and now translated for the first time — can be seen as a reference text. Ricoeur shows in what sense the concept of the person must be broadened in order to continue functioning. The person as `narrative identity' can only write history through the medium of language and institutions. Starting from very different assumptions, the articles by Louis Janssens & Joseph Selling and the analysis of Roland Breeur also explore the idea that a person is what he is only when his identity is opened up, touched by an exteriority or conceived as a focal point . It is this radical openness and vulnerability that gives the person its historical and transcendent dynamic, and prevents us from encapsulating it in existing systems, theories and power relations. The connection with Emmanuel Levinas and his hermeneutic of the idea of the infinite is an obvious one to draw.The third section contains a historical survey in which a number of active `personalistic' centres and journals are presented.Various European centres that appeal explicitly to some form of personalistic thinking were posed the following questions: What is the main historical reference to personalism at your centre? and How do you implement, today, a personalist credo in your work? John Dick organized the responses to these questions under a number of headings. This survey aims to provide not so much an exhaustive but a representative picture of the ways in which European personalism lives on as a mosaic of centres engaged in everyday history. (shrink)

This article presents Paul Ricoeur's ideas about translation in view of giving some guidelines for the interpretation of cultures. Ricoeur's `hermeneutics of the self', which stresses the creativity of capable human being, has its source in a conviction of the superabundance of sense over the abundance of nonsense. It is the problem of the transmission of meaning from one language to another, from one culture to another that gives impetus to his preoccupation with translation. Ricoeur's radical astonishment before the plurality (...) of languages and cultures and his deep conviction about `communication' among human beings made him realize the urgent `task of translation' that is accompanied by a `task of morning'. If translation is the paradigm of all exchanges, its practice can provide us some guidelines in the dialogue of cultures. First, one must courageously open oneself to the `test' of the Other, to welcome difference and respect it as unsurpassable. Second, one must wager on the possibility of an `equivalence without identity', to take a non-hierarchical view of cultures. Third, one must undertake the `task of mourning', to learn to narrate otherwise, to interpret otherwise. (shrink)

This essay is interested in the relationship between electronic waste and emergent regimes of labour control operative within the global logistics industry, the task of which is to manage the movement of people and things in the interests of communication, transport and economic efficiencies. It considers the production of non-governable subjects and spaces as they figure in the relation between electronic waste, global logistics industries and biopolitical technologies of labour control.

Disguised plagiarism often goes undetected. An especially subtle type of disguised plagiarism is translation plagiarism, which occurs when the work of one author is republished in a different language with authorship credit taken by someone else. I focus on the challenge of demonstrating this subtle variety of plagiarism and examine the corruptive influence that plagiarizing articles exert on unsuspecting researchers who later cite them in the downstream literature as genuine products of research. I conclude by arguing that an open discussion (...) of plagiarizing articles in philosophy is necessary for maintaining the reliability of the body of published research and for restoring integrity to scholarly communication. (shrink)

Legal wiretapping has gained importance in law enforcement along with the development of information and communication technology. Understanding the language of intercepted persons is essential for the success of a police investigation. Hence, intercept interpreters, as we suggest calling them in this article, are hired. Little is known about this specific work at the interface between language and law. With this article, we desire to contribute to closing this gap by focussing particularly on the translational activity. Our study identifies a (...) fragmented field of research due to the difficulty in accessing workers in this specific field who interpret in a highly confidential phase of criminal investigations. The findings, which are drawn from scarce studies and our empirical data derived from an online questionnaire for a pilot study in Switzerland, demonstrate the wide range of the performed activity intercept interpreting. This article is the first to present translational activity from the perspective of intercept interpreters. The activity differs in many ways from interpretation in court hearings or police interviews. Hence, we suggest categorising interlingual intercept interpretation as a translational activity sui generis and—since previous research has not done justice to the ethical and deontological questions that intercept interpretation raises—advocate for further transdisciplinary research in this field of translation. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I explore the significance of remembering, especially in its communal form, and its relationship to narrative identity by examining the practices that make possible the formation and transmission of a heritage. To explore this issue I use Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur, who have dedicated several of their major works to remembrance and forgetting. In comparing Heidegger and Ricoeur, I suggest that Ricoeur's formulation of the identity of a subject and a community offers an alternative to (...) Heidegger's account. For, if Heidegger's critique of subjectivity offers the possibility of a new relationship to history and community, it nevertheless overlooks the possibility of a humanism that is not tied to a metaphysical account of subjectivity. By contrast, the positive work of remembrance can recover heretofore concealed possibilities through our being faithful to the past, and saving it from the destructive forces of time. To show how the fragility of memory preserves the past against the destructive work of time and brings with it the hope of a better future, I emphasize one specific theme--namely, the debt we owe to the dead, which dissertations the possibility for ethical consideration of an historical community. In this regard, this dissertation pursues two goals. The first task is to elucidate how Heidegger's and Ricoeur's phenomenological projects understand the intimate connection between remembrance and the creation of a community. The second goal of this dissertation is to show how Ricoeur is able to respond to the problems that Heidegger's ontological account of memory raises. The completion of these two tasks will contribute to a phenomenological hermeneutics of memory and forgetting. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that translational research practitioners need to acquire special skills and knowledge that will enable them to anticipate, analyze, and manage a range of ethical issues. While there is a small but growing literature that addresses the ethics of translational research, there is a dearth of scholarship regarding how this might apply to engineers. In this paper we examine engineers as key translators and argue that they are well positioned to ask transformative ethical questions. Asking engineers to (...) both broaden and deepen their consideration of ethics in their work, however, requires a shift in the way ethics is often portrayed and perceived in science and engineering communities. Rather than interpreting ethics as a roadblock to the success of translational research, we suggest that engineers should be encouraged to ask questions about the socio-ethical dimensions of their work. This requires expanding the conceptual framework of engineering beyond its traditional focus on “how” and “what” questions to also include “why” and “who” questions to facilitate the gathering of normative, socially-situated information. Empowering engineers to ask “why” and “who” questions should spur the development of technologies and practices that contribute to improving health outcomes. (shrink)

The subject to be interrogated is the problem of the extent to which differences in meaning across cultural experiences often affect translation and the chances of human communication. This is particularly significant in a world currently plagued by oppression, domination, colonialism, conflicts, prejudices, intolerance, discrimination, inequity and misconceptions.We are examining the issue of the perception that difference is a threat to cooperation, harmony and dialogue among peoples and institutions of the world. The aim of this study is to philosophically examine (...) this idea and to show that cultural difference could be a tool for building up a world where the much required values of harmony, respect for others, reciprocity and cooperation can be established using philosophical arguments by prominent or eminent African philosophers such as Wiredu and Diop amongothers. Methodologically, this study is necessary because there is a need to examine the philosophical dimensions of this issue from an African philosophical viewpoint. Wiredu pushes the argument from cultural universals while Diop makes a case for a cultural and historical basis of difference. Our key finding has been to show that there are some key philosophical theoriesthat go beyond the views of Wiredu and Diop among others. The idea is to anchor difference on a set of moral values needed for establishing enduring intercultural dialogue on an ethical foundation. The work identifies for instance, tolerance, mutual recognition, compromise and human dignity as pillars of enduring mutually respectful intercultural communication. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in how the notion of corporate social responsibility as shared value creation is translated in Scandinavia. However, current research seems to disregard that the specific institutional context is ambiguous, enabling the organization, and its internal stakeholders to translate the institutional logics into contradictory meanings of CSR as shared value creation. Building on the institutional logics perspective and the metaphor of translation, and framed within a case study of a Danish CSR frontrunner, this paper explores how (...) the notion of CSR as shared value creation is translated at both the organizational and individual level through discourse. The study shows that the organization and its internal stakeholders employ different strategies to reconcile the institutional logics of ethics and economy, suggesting that the translation processes are a complex communicative matter of continuously balancing the contradictory institutional logics to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of external stakeholders. (shrink)

Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of philology and William Gass's concept of transreading, Huiwen (Helen) Zhang employs “transreader” to suggest the integration of four roles in one: reader, translator, writer, and scholar. “Transreader” recognizes that close reading, literary translation, creative writing, and cultural hermeneutics are interdependent activities with intertwined goals: to transfer, transvalue, transform, and transcend the canon. From this perspective, Lu Xun, China's Nietzsche, is a twentieth-century transreader of the canon, and his prose poem “Revenge (The Second)” delivers a (...) self-referential ethics of transreading. Zhang's transreading of this poem shows why slow reading is today more necessary than ever, in what sense translation is a universal dilemma, how humanity grows when its expression grows more subtle, and that transreading opens a space for genuine communication. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss the idea of teachers as knowledge translators, not in a pedagogical or didactical sense, but in a “professional” one. A professional practice is supposed to be theoretically informed by academic research. In the name of effectiveness and efficiency, current policies in teaching and higher education repeatedly ask for research-based practices that legitimize the adoption of an instrumental view of knowledge. Knowledge is conceived of as detached from the context in which it was produced and (...) becomes a commodity that can be mobilized by the researcher or the teacher at any time, as if language is a direct and transparent vehicle of thought. But this idea fails to recognize that language endlessly translates and produces new meanings, which imply that “knowledge users” have a responsibility with regard to the meaning they give to the research, policy documents or professional accounts they are “mobilizing” for practice. Here, I will discuss this translation framework, using fruitful ideas developed in the field of translation studies. Then the framework is put to work through the analysis of concrete, and somewhat unfortunate, translations that Donald Schön’s influential work on reflective practice has undergone. These observations lead to an exploration of some concrete implications of an ethic of translation, which would require fostering some translational dispositions in teachers and the creation of translational spaces for teachers’ “professional development”. (shrink)

Translating ethical theories into clinical practice presents a perennial challenge to educators. While many suggestions have been put forth to bridge the theory-practice gap, none have sufficiently remedied the problem. We believe the ascendance of hospital medicine, as a dominant new force in medical education and patient care, presents a unique opportunity that could redefine the way clinical ethics is taught. The field of hospital medicine in the United States is comprised of more than 50,000 hospitalists—specialists in inpatient medicine—representing the (...) fastest growing subspecialty in the history of medicine, and its members have emerged as a dominant new force around which medical education and patient care pivot. This evolution in medical education presents a unique opportunity for the clinical ethics community. Through their proximity to patients and trainees, hospitalists have the potential to teach medical ethics in real time on the wards, but most hospitalists have not received formal training in clinical ethics. We believe it is time to strengthen the ties between hospital medicine and medical ethics, and in this article we outline how clinical ethicists might collaborate with hospitalists to identify routine issues that do not rise to the level of an “ethics consult,” but nonetheless require an intellectual grounding in normative reasoning. We use a clinical vignette to explore how this approach might enhance and broaden the scope of medical education that occurs in the inpatient setting: A patient with an intra-abdominal abscess is admitted to the academic hospitalist teaching service for drainage of the fluid, hemodynamic support, and antimicrobial therapy. During the initial encounter with the hospitalist and his team of medical students and residents, the patient reports night sweats and asks if this symptom could be due to the abscess. How should the hospitalist approach this question? (shrink)

Ricœur’s philosophy never locates itself directly in the field of philosophical aesthetics inasmuch as philosophical aesthetics never arises as a field of major questioning and discursive development for Ricœur’s philosophy or as a field that would guide that philosophy. However, Ricœur maintains an ongoing but complex connection with aesthetics throughout his philosophical work. Here we defend the thesis that there are difficulties relating both to the complexity of Ricœur’s philosophy and to the crisis situation of aesthetics as an autonomous field (...) of philosophical inquiry. A more direct confrontation with philosophical aesthetics, such as that developed by analytic philosophy and critical theory today, is necessary in order to be aware of this connection between Ricœur’s philosophy and aesthetics. It then appears that if Ricœur’s philosophy makes it possible to maintain a certain autonomy of the field of aesthetics inherited from Kant, it is not through developing some unlikely “Ricœurian aesthetic” but thanks to a Ricœurian philosophy of aesthetics essentially determined on three levels: 1) the connection between poetics and aesthetics within a philosophy of imagination, 2) the connection between criticism and hermeneutics with regard the notions of text and distanciation, 3) the connection between ontology and communication that summarizes the two previous steps by combining phenomenological, analytic and critical perspectives. Thus it can be assumed that this autonomy of the field of aesthetics is possible only at a horizon of meaning determined by Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology: at the axiological level, the field of aesthetics differs upstream from the field of poetics and downstream from the field of ethics; at the ontological level, Ricœur’s philosophy of aesthetics concerns a region that is both intermediate between and congruent to those treated by Ricœur’s philosophy of imagination and by Ricœur’s philosophy of action. (shrink)

A critical reflection on the intersubjective relationship. Firstly, we describe the concept of the ‘I’ in Ricoeur’s thinking. As the first grammatical person, the ‘I’ shows a fundamental ambiguity. It is situated as original freedom or subjectivity, that objectifies itself in actions. This becomes apparent from the attestation of freedom and from the linguistic structure of acting. Secondly, we expound how this double status of freedom is the precondition for a responsible relation with the other, marked by symmetry and respect. (...) Ricoeur offers here a promising alternative to the difficulties of Levinas’s thinking. The discussion between Ricoeur and Levinas is mainly about the evaluation of Husserl, although Ricoeur seems to be mostly inspired by Kant’s view of human respect. Finally, we confront Ricoeur’s interpretation of intersubjectivity as respect with the problem of forgiveness as it is developed in the second text of Ricoeur we find translated in this book. (shrink)

“The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s _Time and Narrative_ available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument.” The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur’s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the (...) extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur’s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur’s _Temps et récit_, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative_ _presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of _Temps et récit,_ Ricoeur’s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in _Temps et récit_: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed _Time and Narrative, _looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur’s dismantling of established theories and arguments—Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation—while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur’s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another. "The scholarship in William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative____ __is impeccable; Dowling knows Ricoeur inside out. He highlights Ricoeur's most important arguments, presents them in a limpid, concise language, and links them to the relevant nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical developments. Dowling's book provides us with a lucid, intelligible version of Ricoeur's major work, one that will be of considerable significance to philosophers, historians, and literary theorists." —_Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of French Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago_ "William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _is a subtle and remarkably well-sustained piece of work. It provides a detailed introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative theory—already a considerable achievement, given the difficulty of Ricoeur's text. However, Dowling also shows us, sometimes explicitly, sometimes simply through the way he conducts his argument, why we should bother with Ricoeur—what we have to gain from knowing him better than we do, however well we may think we know him." —_Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University _. (shrink)

Offers a major English study of Daoist religious ethics. Based on translations of primary sources, this book is a useful read for those interested in Daoism, comparative ethics, or Chinese history.

We face significant challenges in the translation of basic biomedical research into meaningful improvements in patients' health, moving research from “bench to bedside.” The federal government's ne...

Unusually, Fratelli tutti and Laudato si’ both cite the work of French thinker Paul Ricoeur. It is unusual because reference to individual scholars can be rare in Catholic social teaching, and because Ricoeur was a philosopher, and not a Catholic. Yet Ricoeur’s work, which spanned nearly seventy years and incorporated both philosophy and engagement with religious resources, focused on meaningful communication in text and action for the work of living together. For an encyclical committed to rethinking and rejuvenating attitudes to (...) each other in public life, across disagreement, Ricoeur’s work provides an ideal conversation partner. His approach involves attending carefully to the ethical entanglement of self and other, mediated by the institution. This attention supports the driving concern and reasoning of Fratelli tutti—to recenter the agency of neighbor, people, and institution for the fragile political work of deliberation, cooperation, and action. (shrink)

Community engagement is gaining prominence in global health research. So far, a philosophical rationale for why researchers should perform community engagement during such research has not been provided by ethics scholars. Its absence means that conducting community engagement is still often viewed as no more than a ‘good idea’ or ‘good practice’ rather than ethically required. In this article, we argue that shared health governance can establish grounds for requiring the engagement of low‐ and middle‐income country (LMIC) (...) community members in global health research, where such research aims to help reduce health disparities. This philosophical basis has important implications for the ethical goals ascribed to engagement and the approach adopted to undertake it. We suggest the ethical goals of engagement in equity‐oriented global health research should include: (a) generating research topics and questions that reflect the key problems disadvantaged groups face in accessing healthcare, services and broader social determinants of health and (b) promoting the translation of research findings into policy and practice in ways that benefit the health of disadvantaged groups. We propose engagement practice should have the following features: deliberation with LMIC community members to make a range of project decisions, beginning with setting research topics and questions; inclusion of members of disadvantaged groups and those with the power to change policy and practice to benefit them; and purposeful structuring of deliberations to minimize the impact of power disparities between LMIC community members. Finally, we reflect on how these features differ from those typical of much current community engagement practice in LMICs. (shrink)

In recent years, there have been reports about increased religious discrimination in schools. As a way of acknowledging the importance of religion and faith communities in the public sphere and to propose a solution to the exclusion of religious citizens, the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas suggests an act of translation for which both secular and religious citizens are mutually responsible. What gets lost in Habermas’s translation, this paper argues, is the condition that makes translation both necessary and (im)possible. Drawing on (...) Walter Benjamin’s notion of the mysterious untranslatable and the task of the translator, the paper approaches translation as an ethical process involving risk, asymmetry and uncertainty. Not knowing where this risk will lead, the paper takes the ethical ambivalence at play in Jacques Derrida’s notion of the untranslatable and explores this in relation to religious difference in education. It argues that the untranslatable needs to be acknowledged in terms of a respect for difference and a limit to narration, if students with religious convictions are not to be further violated in schools. (shrink)

Here, some of the most influential thinkers in theological and philosophical ethics develop new directions for research in contemporary moral thought. Taking as their starting point Ricoeur's recent work on moral anthropology, the contributors set a vital agenda for future conversations about ethics and just community.

Opioid use disorder can encompass a number of behavioral, psychological, physiological, and interpersonal symptoms which collectively impair one’s functioning to different degrees. Of all the personal and societal problems associated with OUD, the most destructive and absolute is death. Given the caustic effects of OUD on quality of life and mortality, evidence-based pharmacotherapy and psychosocial interventions are necessary. It is the collective potential for buprenorphine to increase safety and concurrent cognitive-behavioral group therapy to address substance use triggers as well as (...) comorbid psychiatric conditions, which makes this combination particularly promising for RCT of effectiveness. The purposes of this article are to identify specific ethical issues which may hinder community partners from collaborating with clinical trialist wishing to conduct CBGT buprenorphine efficacy-effectiveness trials at their agency and provide some basic guidelines and methods for addressing these community partner ethical concerns. The purpose of the manuscript is to facilitate university and substance use/mental health center community collaborations that will result in ethical clinical trial methodology and findings that meaningfully translate to efficacious, effective, and generalizable CBGT and buprenorphine hybrid interventions for OUD. (shrink)

The debate about the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence dates from the 1960s :741–742, 1960; Wiener in Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, MIT Press, New York, 1961). However, in recent years symbolic AI has been complemented and sometimes replaced by Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques. This has vastly increased its potential utility and impact on society, with the consequence that the ethical debate has gone mainstream. Such a debate has primarily focused on principles—the (...) ‘what’ of AI ethics —rather than on practices, the ‘how.’ Awareness of the potential issues is increasing at a fast rate, but the AI community’s ability to take action to mitigate the associated risks is still at its infancy. Our intention in presenting this research is to contribute to closing the gap between principles and practices by constructing a typology that may help practically-minded developers apply ethics at each stage of the Machine Learning development pipeline, and to signal to researchers where further work is needed. The focus is exclusively on Machine Learning, but it is hoped that the results of this research may be easily applicable to other branches of AI. The article outlines the research method for creating this typology, the initial findings, and provides a summary of future research needs. (shrink)

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is the progenitor of modern linguistics and the originator of the modern teaching and research university. However, his work has received remarkably little attention in the English-speaking world. Humboldt conceives language as the source of cognition as well as communication, both rooted in the possibility of human dialogue. In the same way, his idea of the university posits the free encounter between radically different personalities as the source of education for freedom. For Humboldt, both linguistic and (...) intellectual communication are predicated firstly on dialogue between persons, which is the prerequisite for all intercultural understanding. Linking Humboldt's concept of dialogue to his idea of translation between languages, persons, and cultures, this book shows how Humboldt's thought is of great contemporary relevance. Humboldt shows a way beyond the false alternatives of "culturalism" (the demand that a plurality of cultural and faith-based traditions be recognized as sources of ethical and political legitimacy in the modern world) and "universalism" (the assertion of the primacy of a universal culture of human rights and the renewal of the European Enlightenment project). John Walker explains how Humboldt's work emerges from the intellectual conflicts of his time and yet directly addresses the concerns of our own post-secular and multicultural age. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted many issues that can occur due to lack of translation between the spheres of bioethics and clinical practice. In this paper, we examine how mothers and newborn infants were inappropriately separated during the initial stages of the pandemic due to inconsistent application of ethical principles in determining policy. One of the significant challenges that translational bioethics face is the complexity regarding its implementation into the health service environment. As outlined in the literature, it may be postulated (...) that responsibility for translating bioethics from philosophical concepts into practice is the duty of those training in philosophical theory and reasoning. However, the use of bioethics in informing clinical practice is not just the case of needing a translator but rather requires an interpreter in the widest sense: professionals attuned to both bioethics and clinical practice, who can communicate with both groups effectively. A two-way dialogue needs to be more cohesively established to ensure clinical practice is guided by ethical principles and to focus academic debate towards the pragmatic issues that require ethical exploration. Utilising the translational bioethics model described by Bærøe and applying it to our perinatal COVID case study, we examine how an integrated translational bioethics approach could have prevented the harm and disruption to mother–infant dyads during the initial phase of the pandemic in 2020. (shrink)

Physicians and other medical practitioners make untold numbers of judgments about patient care on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These judgments fall along a number of spectrums, from the mundane to the tragic, from the obvious to the challenging. Under the rubric of evidence-based medicine, these judgments will be informed by the robust conclusions of medical research. In the ideal circumstance, medical research makes the best decision obvious to the trained professional. Even when practice approximates this ideal, it does (...) so unevenly. Judgments in medical practice are always accompanied by uncertainty, and this uncertainty is a fickle companion—constant in its presence but inconstant in its expression. This feature of medical judgments gives rise to the moral responsibility of medical practitioners to be epistemically humble. This requires the recognition and communication of the uncertainty that accompanies their judgment as well as a commitment to avoiding intuitive innovations. (shrink)

Looking at Holocaust testimonies, which in her view always involve some form of translation, the author seeks to develop an ethics of translation in the context of Levinas’ hyperbolic ethics of responsibility. Calling on Benjamin and Derrida to make explicit the precipitous task of the translator, she argues that the translator faces an ethical call or assignation that resembles the fundamental structure of Levinasian subjectivity. The author relates the paradoxes of translation in Holocaust testimony to Levinas’ silence on the problem (...) of translation—puzzling if one considers Levinas’ focus on the ethical essence of language, his multilingualism, and the fact that he wrote his texts in a second language. She proposes that the trace of the philosopher’s displacement from his linguistic community can be discerned in his exilic conception of ethical subjectivity and in the testimonial impetus that animates his work. Thus, although Levinas’ Saying is posited as a translinguistic horizon that transcends the boundaries of a particular national language, it carries the remainder of the disavowed loss of the mother tongue. (shrink)