This paper raises the question whether language and violence are internally connected. It starts from the experience of violence and from its theoretical interpretation as violence in the context of political forms of life which are challenged by complaints about violence. Such forms of life have to confront this issue because they are supposed to be responsive to claims and demands of others who articulate violence as an experience of violation. Whether a kind of responsive ethos may be based on (...) the suspected inner connection between language and violence is being discussed at the end. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to put Ricœur’s philosophy in dialogue with human geography. There are at least two good reasons to do so. The first concerns the epistemological foundation of geography: Whereas humanistic or phenomenological geographers inspired by Heidegger or, to a lesser extent, by Merleau-Ponty have sometimes taken on an anti-scientific approach, the Ricœurian articulation of understanding and explanation may contribute to building a bridge between the experiential side of place-meanings and the scientific explanations of spatial elements (...) and their relationships. The second reason has to do with the application of the Ricœurian “model of the text” to landscape: It is a direction that Ricœur never explicitly took, but it is worth exploring, especially considering that “landscape as a text” was quite a popular metaphor among human geographers in the 1980s and 1990s. In this paper I will discuss both issues in order to outline a “Ricœurian path to geography,” which, while never explicitly developed by the philosopher, may represent an innovative and fruitful actualization of his thought. (shrink)