Author: George Sarantoulias
Sarantoulias, George, 2019 The Creativity of Social Action and the Social Imaginaries Field: Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur in Dialogue., Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Terms of Use: This electronic version is (or will be) made publicly available by Flinders University in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. You may use this material for uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material and/or you believe that any material has been made available without permission of the copyright owner please contact copyright@flinders.edu.au with the details.
This thesis focusses on action as it relates to social imaginaries. In order to develop the notion of action within the social imaginaries framework, this research draws on two of the field’s four main theorists: Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur. According to Castoriadis and Ricoeur, action is creative and brings into the world novel forms of social reality. Correspondingly, through a social imaginaries lens, society, is also understood as creative and self-creating. The premise that action is creative is in line with recent debates in sociology on the creativity of action (Joas 1996; Elliott and Turner 2012). This thesis takes Castoriadis’s and Ricoeur’s key contributions and critically reconstructs their selected works to gain a better understanding of the connection between social imaginaries, creativity, and action. This project will help strengthen the social imaginaries framework and our understanding of the particular types of action within it. The research employs a critical hermeneutic methodology to reconstruct each theorist’s specific understanding of action and its creativity within a social imaginaries framework.
Keywords: Castoriadis, Ricoeur, Social imaginaries, Creativity, Social Action
Subject: Philosophy thesis
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2019
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Suzi Adams