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This chapter presents Paul Ricœur's hermeneutical philosophy as a philosophical basis for business ethics and philosophy of management. Ricœur developed his hermeneutic philosophy in close interaction with les penseurs du soupçon: Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Moreover, Ricœur also agreed with Deleuze in his characterization of structuralism as transcendentalism without the subject. There are many similarities between the project of Ricœur and Deleuze's critical philosophy of difference, in the sense that they both refuse a Hegelian dialectics of perfect mediations. Indeed, Derrida was one of Ricœur's pupils and they had important discussions about the foundations of interpretation and metaphor as central to language and meaning. Ricœur was a persistent critic of poststructuralism, who built a hermeneutical ethics and political philosophy that takes the poststructuralist challenge seriously, while at the same reformulating a new hermeneutic philosophy beyond the poststructuralist project. This is, indeed, an important project that also has an impact on the foundations of business ethics, responsibility, and organization theory.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-8845-8_8

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