A remarkable convergence between phenomenology and analytic philosophy: the Ricoeurian reading of Sartre and Rvle's theses on the imagination

The aim of this article is to analyse the meaning and the implications of the comparative interpretation of Sartre's and Ryle's theses on imagination that Ricoeur undertook in the still unpublished text of his Lectures on Imagination. These lectures were delivered at the University of Chicago in 1975. First, the article shows how Ricoeur brings out a strong convergence, both in the method and in the presuppositions, of the Sartrean and Rylean conceptions of imagination : the choice of a descriptive method leads the two philosophers to a common critique of the mental image. Secondly, the article analyses the properly critical side of the Ricoeurian interpretation by showing how it eventually brings to light the common theoretical limitation of Sartre's and Ryle's theses on imagination. According to Ricoeur, those theses lead to a conception of image as picture and fail to consider the image as fiction, and so they remain locked in a theory of reproductive imagination and of the primacy of perception.