Ricœur, Dead or Alive? – Actualités de Ricœur Seminar 2026–2027 | ESOL edit
CFP for conference or similarSeptember 20, 2026
Ricœur, Dead or Alive? – Actualités de Ricœur Seminar 2026–2027
Call for paper proposals from early-career researchers exploring Ricœur's philosophy and its contemporary philosophical, ethical, and political relevance.
“Actualités de Ricœur” (“Ricœur Studies Today”)
École Normale Supérieure (ENS)
doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career scholars
The first edition, “Ricœur, Dead or Alive?”, asks about both the internal vitality of Ricœur’s œuvre and its capacity to contribute to contemporary philosophical, ethical, and political debates.
The seminar will feature two speakers per two-hour session, with 30 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of discussion for each speaker.
Themes
Axis I. Life as Resistance — Language, Time, and Action
This axis examines how life affirms, narrates, and configures itself in the face of what negates it, including evil, forgetting, and death.
Possible approaches include:
Language as resistance: semantic innovation, the “living metaphor,” and resistance to the entropy of language.
Narrative as resistance: emplotment, temporal discordance, and the challenge of Heideggerian being-towards-death.
Memory as resistance: forgetting, fidelity to life, and an ethics of memory in Memory, History, Forgetting.
Axis II. A Life of One’s Own — Selfhood, Vulnerability, Ethicity
This axis explores vulnerability as a condition of ethical possibility and examines the relationship between selfhood, otherness, suffering, recognition, and the pursuit of a good life.
Possible approaches include:
The ordeal of narrative identity: identity collapse, illness, exile, trauma, and Ricœur’s dialogue with theories of identity and gender studies.
The reciprocity of recognition: self-recognition, mutual recognition, vulnerability, care, Weil, and Levinas.
The ethical life: Ricœur’s conception of the “good life” in situations of precarity, thwarted life, and desubjectivation.
Axis III. Ricœur’s Survival — Present Legacies
This axis invites proposals placing Ricœur’s texts in critical dialogue with contemporary problems rather than limiting themselves to historical reconstruction.
Possible approaches include:
Radical alterity in phenomenology: Ricœur’s encounters with Derrida and Levinas and their implications for hospitality, communication, and responsibility.
Philosophical anthropology: the “capable human being” and new forms of collective, distributed, and digital agency, including dialogue with Stiegler and Arendt.
Justice today: memory conflicts, reconciliation, postcolonial reparations, transitional justice, and Ricœur’s reflections on justice, collective memory, and forgiveness.
Submission Guidelines
Proposals are welcome from researchers in philosophy, literary studies, theology, social sciences, law, and other disciplines, provided they are grounded in Ricœur’s texts and contemporary debates in which Ricœurian theory can be fruitfully mobilized. Comparative and transdisciplinary proposals are encouraged.
Proposals may be submitted in French or English.
Please submit:
An anonymized abstract of 400–600 words in Word format, including the paper title, chosen axis, and thesis defended, together with an indicative bibliography.
A brief bio-bibliographical note in the body of the email, including name, affiliation, current position, and thesis supervisor where applicable.
Abstract formatting: Times New Roman or Arial, 12-point font, 1.5 line spacing.
Email subject line: [Seminar Application] Surname – Title of the Paper
Selected speakers will subsequently be invited to submit a preparatory text of no more than 25,000 characters, to be circulated to participants one week before the session.
The organizers encourage speakers to participate in person. Remote participation will nevertheless be possible where applicable. The seminar has no dedicated budget for travel or accommodation reimbursement, so in-person participation is at the speakers’ own expense.