Paul Ricoeur on the Specificity of Religious Language
This essay arises out of an initial curiosity on my part regarding references in some of Paul Ricoeur's recent essays to the "specificity" of religious language. In particular, I was puzzled why he did not use the more familiar terminology of the "nature" or "essence" of religious language. In what follows, I shall attempt to account for this change in terminology and to indicate its significance both for Ricoeur's own work in hermeneutics and for reflection on religion in general. As we shall see, what Ricoeur has to say about the specificity of religious language reveals much about the general direction and development of his current work on hermeneutics while raising several interesting yet difficult questions about how his insights may be appropriated and expanded beyond his own particular concerns. I shall begin by briefly summarizing how and why the problem of the specificity of religious language arises in Ricoeur's philosophy. Then I shall present his position concerning this problem as it is currently available to us. On this basis, we can attain a solid enough footing to assess his contribution to making sense of religious language and to understanding that language. The first point to be noted is that Ricoeur's concern for religious language-or discourse (see below)-must be seen as a part of his broader concern for the philosophy of language in general, a concern which he himself has indicated has come to occupy a more and more central place in his thinking. This recognition of the importance of language as a philosophical issue, of course, first appears in his work as related to the question of how to introduce the dimension of evil into a reflective approach to the structure of the will, a phenom-