Review of: Ricoeur P. Genesis, essence and substance in Plato and Aristotle. Course taught at the University of Strasbourg in 1953–1954 / transl. from french G. V. Vdovina. Moscow: Publishing house of humanitarian literature, 2019. 286 p.

Abstract

P. Ricoeur's course of lectures, delivered more than half a century ago, is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, because it is devoted to an extremely important topic - ancient ontology; secondly, because it was read by one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century; thirdly, because this philosopher was the biggest representative of the hermeneutic direction, so it is especially interesting to trace how he reads texts of, without exaggeration, the most important philosophers in the history of mankind. However, from the formal point of view, there are some doubts about the feasibility of the idea of the work: Ricoeur is not an antiquarian and his knowledge of Greek, as the text shows, is rather modest; besides, the published text is a course of lectures, the author of which seems to want not so much to convey the results of laborious research and elaborated ideas to his students, as to understand ancient ontology together with the students.