From the memory to the representation

The problem of the epistemology of the history in Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

The article takes as a purpose the analysis of the second part of the last big book of Paul Ricoeur, Memory, history, forgetting, which refers to the epistemology of the history. The text is structured in three parts that correspond to the subject-matters to which its title refers and Ricoeur realizes opportunely a general panorama or “general note of orientation” that serves like introduction to each of the parts as the book. The author faces, then, the reader (thing for that one is grateful) and he speaks to us about the interests and targets of its investigation, as well as of the justification of the lexicon or used terminology. The phenomenology of the memory, the epistemology of the history and the hermeneutics of the historical condition are three fundamental matters of this work, but the matter of the representation joins them. This way, in a concrete way, our target is to continue the conductive thread of the memory to the representation like fundamental way of the epistemology of the history.