Dialogue and Universalism

Volume 15, Issue 3/4, 2005

Sources and New Dreams of Western Wisdom

Rethinking the Relation between Mythos and Logos
An Aristotelian Reappraisal of Paul Ricoeur’s Theory of Metaphor

In this essay, I will show one way in which Ricoeur utilizes Aristotle’s discussions in Rhetoric and Poetics; I will take my point of departure from his hermeneutic theory of metaphor. Here, he reverses the Aristotelian intention by blending the domains of discourse we call mythos and logos in a way which suggests that the latter is subsumed by the former. While one can argue that the two are co-emergent processes, Ricoeur’s formulation undermines one side of the dialectic between them.