Today, there is an emerging interest for the potential role of hermeneutics in reflecting on the practices related to digital technologies and their consequences. Nonetheless, such an interest has not yet given rise to a unitary approach nor to a shared debate. The primary goal of this paper is to map and synthetize the different existing perspectives in order to pave the way for an open discussion on the topic. The article is developed in two steps. In the first section, the authors analyse digital hermeneutics "in theory" by confronting and systematising the existing literature. In particular, they stress three main distinctions among the approaches: 1) between "methodological" and "ontological" digital hermeneutics; 2) between data-and text-oriented digital hermeneutics and 3) between "quantitative" and "qualitative" credos in digital hermeneutics. In the second section, they consider digital hermeneutics "in action", by critically analysing the uses of digital data (notably tweets) for studying a classical object such as the political opinion. In the conclusion, we will pave the way to an ontological turn in digital hermeneutics. Most of this article is devoted to the methodological issue of interpreting with digital machines. The main task of an ontological digital hermeneutics would consist instead in wondering if it is legitimate, and eventually to which extent, to speak of digital technologies, or at least of some of them, as interpretational machines.

The morphological account of landscape aims to overcome the contrast between an objectivist/scientific account of space and the more qualitative/subjective account of place. It does so by actualizing the notion of landscape, which endows a materiality often overlooked in contemporary spatial theories. In this paper, I will discuss what has been called the ‘space-place conundrum’ by referring mostly to the human geography contemporary debate on space and place. In the following, I will retrieve Carl Sauer’s morphological conception of landscape as an alternative framework aimed at rephrasing both the concepts of space and place. Landscape must be freed from the cage of the aesthetic gaze so that it can be understood as a lived and dynamic complex of interacting forms that encompass the embodied subject. In the end, I will outline the main characteristics of a morphological conception of landscape, paving the way for further inquiries.

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.

Introduction to special issue "Ricoeur and the Problem of Space"

Introduction française au numéro spécial "Ricœur et la question de l'espace"