From the Linguistic Turn to the Pictorial Turn - Hermeneutics Facing the "Third Copernican Revolution"

n this article, I will deal with the role of pictures within discus- sions on the crisis of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics. Firstly, I will argue that some of the aporias this debate runs up against can be over- come by a reconsideration of the traditional dualism of word and image. In this regard my reference point is Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor. His model of the living metaphor overcomes the difficulties posed by the hermeneutics of the symbol and restores the image to an internal force within language: image seeks language to give itself form, and language seeks image to feed on new meanings. Secondly, I will reconstruct some aspects of the interdisciplinary debate around the so-called ‘pictorial turn’, in which, I will argue, very interesting features can be identified that Ri- coeur’s theory of metaphor merely foreshadows. In this reactivation of the role of pictures, the debate concerning the outcomes of twentieth-century hermeneutics can probably make new claims on our attention.