CALL FOR PAPERS - INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW - SPECIAL ISSUE - On Ricoeur: Justice, Hermeneutics, Responsibility, and Personal Identity

 CALL FOR PAPERS
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW
SPECIAL ISSUE
On Ricoeur: Justice, Hermeneutics, Responsibility, and Personal Identity

Volume 38 (2025)

Guest Editors – Peter Langford & Rafe McGregor

(Edge Hill University)

The work of Paul Ricoeur is animated by an insistent philosophical engagement with the position and orientation of human existence. An integral aspect of Ricoeur’s philosophical engagement concerns the relationship between individual existence, as a question of personal identity, and co-existence, as a question of social life. This engagement is shaped by a reflexive interpretation – a hermeneutics – of these aspects of human existence in a manner that has been termed a ‘hermeneutics of the human condition’ (Domenico Jervolino, Paul Ricoeur, Une herméneutique de la condition humaine, 2002).

The presence of law within the framework of this reflexive interpretation arises through the question of justice, which situates law in relation to both personal identity and human co-existence. The passage from the individual to human co-existence becomes that of the interconnection between responsibility and justice. In this manner, law becomes a domain or region of reflection in and through its connection to morality, ethics, and politics. Law is a distinct, but neither self-contained nor self-sufficient, domain whose distinctiveness is to be considered through its interconnection with these other domains. The position accorded to law is thus the expression of a wider, reflexive reconfiguration of the interrelationship of all these domains.

The reconfiguration results from an overarching process of reflexive interpretation that involves the selection of, and interpretative orientation to, the texts which form the material or corpus for this overarching process. It is in this selection and interpretation that the distinctive character of Ricoeurian hermeneutics is elaborated, the question of justice raised, and the domain of law accorded its particular position. We invite proposals that explore one or more of these themes of this special issue on the work of Paul Ricoeur.

Submissions should be addressed to: Peter Langford (langforp@edgehill.ac.uk) and Rafe McGregor (mcgregor@edgehill.ac.uk).

- Abstracts of 300 words (maximum) by 1 January 2025.

- After selection, final papers (10,000 words maximum, including endnotes and references) should be submitted by 1 June 2025.