Hermeneutical phenomenology contribution to social psychology

Abstract

This presentation of the current French philosophy's renewal underlines Ricoeur's hermeneutical phenomenology contributions to social psychology, since it focuses the personal and collective history as a process integrated to action, narration, language, symbolical elaboration and the construction of identity and alterity (otherness). His historical and cultural approach makes it possible to go beyond the limits of cartesianism, positivism and cognitivism, deepening the study of the subjectivity and its formation, inserted in the personal history, in social relations, in concrete experience and in the broader social history of groups, institutions and communities. It corresponds not only to a progress in the study of language and interpretation, but also to the rising of a new paradigm of Reason, the hermeneutical paradigm, and to the creation of a method capable of exploring new aspects of the psychosocial dynamics, besides being a key to the interpretation of the plurality of languages and identities of the present globalized society.