The Role of Cultural Mediations as Possibility of Reading of the Human Sciences in Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

This article seeks to present Paul Ricouer’s critique of the modern paradigm of cartesian rationality. For beyond mere criticism, he pursues a reflexive philosophy that must pass through cultural mediations, configured in representations, actions, works, institutions, monuments that aim it, in such a way that, in these objects of symbolic amplitude, the "reflective self" can lose and find itself. Hermeneutics, through the interpretative effort, the long way, seeks to reveal the latent, in a process of constant confrontation with all the meanings that are manifested in culture. In this sense, the french philosopher brings a proposal for a critical expansion of horizons for the understanding of the world and the possible reconstruction of reflection, with its expanded realities, without falling in the traps of ideological manipulations and narrowings of reductionist scientisms.