Understanding and explanation. Paul Ricœur and human geography

Abstract

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.

Evidence of the Relationship between Social Vulnerability and the Spread of COVID-19 in Urban Spaces

“…Toward this end, we carry out a multidimensional analysis and propose a spatial model that allows the representation of the vulnerability condition together with the COVID contagion situation [4,5]. We consider that representing together these two features could be useful to design prevention policies, although we assume the relation between COVID contagion and vulnerability is not universal [6].…”