Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutic Challenge of Cultural Authority in Education
Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutic Challenge of Cultural Authority in Education

Summary/Abstract: The author of the article addresses the issue of understanding of the cultural authority in education. In the background of his considerations there are the insights of Paul Ricoeur, who revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding them by creative reflections drawn from the field of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory.The article consists of seven parts, in which the author takes under the consideration the following issues, inspired by Ricoeur, and associated with the understanding of cultural authority: (1) The authority as an object of games with time; (2) Disapproval to the sociological reduction of authority in politics and theology; (3) The authority between the claim to be a possessor of truth, witness to the ongoing process of seeking the truth, and pathos of claim to be transmitter of truth; (4) The authority as a source of ontological debt of gratitude and obligation/commitment; (5) The authority and its disappearance in university education; (6) Authority in vertical and horizontal perspectives; (7) Return to the authority of the masterpieces of culture as a permanent and “distorted” return to oneself.

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