Book Description
Although Paul Ricoeur's writings are widely and appreciatively read by theologians, this book offers a full, sympathetic yet critical account of Ricoeur's theory of narrative interpretation and its contribution to theology. Unlike many previous studies of Ricoeur, Part I argues that Ricoeur's hermeneutics must be viewed in the light of his overall philosophical agenda, as a fusion and continuation of the unfinished projects of Kant and Heidegger. Particularly helpful is the focus on Ricoeur's recent narrative theory as the context in which Ricoeur deals with problems of time and the creative imagination; and it becomes clear that narrative stands at the crossroads of Ricoeur's search for the meaning of human being as well as his search for the meaning of texts. Part II examines the potential of Ricoeur's narrative theory for resolving certain theological problems, such as the dichotomy betweens the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. ... Read more

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Book Description
In Moral Creativity, John Wall argues that moral life and thought are inherently and radically creative. Human beings are called by their own primordially created depths to exceed historical evil and tragedy through the ongoing creative transformation of their world. This thesis challenges ancient Greek and biblical separations of ethics and poetic image-making, as well as contemporary conceptions of moral life as grounded in abstract principles or preconstituted traditions. Taking as his point of departure the poetics of the will of Paul Ricoeur, and ranging widely into critical conversations with Continental, narrative, feminist, and liberationist ethics, Wall uncovers the profound senses in which moral practice and thought involve tension, catharsis, excess, and renewal. In the process, he draws new connections between sin and tragedy, practice and poetics, and morality and myth. Rather than proposing a complete ethics, Moral Creativity is a meta-ethical work investigating the creative capability as part of what it means, morally, to be human. This capability is explored around four dimensions of ontology, teleology, deontology, and social practice. In each case, Wall examines a traditional perspective on the relation of ethics to poetics, critiques it using resources from contemporary phenomenology, and develops a conception of a more original poetics of moral life. In the end, moral creativity is a human capability for inhabiting tensions among others and in social systems and, in the image of a Creator, creating together an ever more radically inclusive moral world. ... Read more

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On Paul Ricoeur examines the later work of Paul Ricoeur, particularly his major work, Time and Narrative. The essays in this volume, including three pieces by Ricoeur, consider Time and Narrative, extending and developing the debate it has inspired.

Time and Narrative is the finest example of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics and is one of the most significant works of philosophy published in the late twentieth century. Paul Ricoeur's study of the intertwining of time and narrative proposes and examines the possibility that narrative could remedy a fatal deficiency in any purely phenomenological approach. He analyzed both literary and historical writing, from Proust to Braudel, as well as key figures in the history of philosophy: Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. His own recognition of his limited success in expunging aporia opens onto the positive discovery of the importance of narrative identity, on which Ricoeur writes here.

An essential companion to Time and Narrative, this collection also provides an excellent introduction to Ricoeur's later work and to contemporary works in philosophical hermeneutics. It will be of major interest to philosophers, literary theorists, and historians. ... Read more

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Traces the decentered formulation of self at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy from his earliest works to his most recent.

Identifying Selfhood provides the first sustained treatment of the development of Paul Ricoeur's decentered formulation of selfhood from his earliest works to his most recent. For Henry Venema, Ricoeur's affirmation that consciousness is always rooted in the signs, symbols, and texts that precede the hermeneutical project of self-recovery and discovery provides the thread that links all of Ricoeur's philosophical inquiries together. However, as Venema argues, Ricoeur's hermeneutic is caught up in the semantics of identity to such an extent that selfhood is confused and often equated with the textuality of the reflective process and is never dealt with on the intimate level of the reflexive structure of selfhood in relation to otherness. In the end, Ricoeur's formulation of alterity identifies the other within the circle of the self-same. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Inquiry
I am interested in corresponding with readers who have read both this book and Rendre justice au droit, Francois-Xavier Druet and Etienne Ganty (eds). ... Read more

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What is the origin of evil? Where does what we term evil come from? According to Paul Ricoeur, to think through evil is to think through fallibility; because human freedom is summed up as existence prior to evil. Deriving from a lecture given in Lausanne in 1985, this small text adds to the immense ouevre of this philosopher who is not regarded as a theologian but whose thinking readily shares some kinship with certain characteristics of Protestantism. The problem of evil was a question which dogged Paul Ricoeur throughout his reflection and his philosophical works.This is a man who has thought about vulnerability in moral evil with both an exemplary profundity and sensitivity.

Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology contains a new extended introduction by Graham Ward which reflects on the significance of Paul Ricoeur's approach to philosophy and to the question of evil for 20th-century theology and philosophy, and a preface by Pierre Gisel. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

What good is wisdom if you can't communicate it?
Over the years, I've been to a boatload of academic conferences and listened to dozens of academic, highly professional papers in philosophy and theology.Too often, the papers are so specialized that only a handful of people in the world could possibly follow them.A not uncommon feeling walking out of a lecture room after hearing one of these papers is "huh?"

Reading (and re-reading, and re-reading yet again) Ricoeur's Evil was like walking out of those lecture rooms--which somehow seems appropriate, since the essay is the text of one of his lectures.Ricoeur at his best is irritatingly obscure.Here, he's maddeningly obtuse.I made the mistake of requiring this book in one of my classes, and none of my students--bright young people all--could figure out what Ricoeur was trying to say.Neither could I, actually.

In broad strokes, Ricoeur wants to claim that the experience of evil, either one's own or another's suffering, can never be demythologized, regardless of how strenuously we try to do so.Discourse about evil historically and psychologically has tended toward reductionism, moving from a mythic account, which simply accepts it as a given in life, to theodicy, which tries to explain it away.But the experience remains irreducible.

Okay.But if this is all Ricoeur is saying, it's neither terribly interesting nor original.What's at stake is why the experience of evil is irreducible, and for the life of me I can't figure out what Ricoeur's answer is.Nor is he clear in discussing the different levels of reductionistic discourse about evil.Especially impenetrable are his discussions of what he calls "the stage of gnosticism and anti-gnostic gnosis" (I don't even know what he intends the second term to mean) and Barth's negative dialectic.

In short, a maddening little book.Its subtitle is "A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology."Too right. ... Read more

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The first systematic exploration of Ricoeur's contributions to the study of rhetoric. ... Read more

Book Description
No contemporary thinker has participated in more intellectual debates in the post-war period than Paul Ricoeur. His writings evolved from an initial concern with existentialism and phenomenology, through structuralism and psychoanalysis and the work he undertook within the hermenuetic tradition, to his recent studies in metaphor and narrative. This introduction is the first study to survey the entire range of Ricoeur's work and, exploiting the obvious thematic parallels, situates it within the context of post-structuralism. It includes the first discussion of Ricoueur's Time and Narrative, a work likely to prove the most significant contribution to the theory of narrative since early structuralism. ... Read more

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Analysis of the ethical and social dimensions of the doctrine of karma in the Mahabharata and in modern India using Paul Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology and hermeneutics. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not Bad as an Introduction to Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy.
This essay examines the question of free will as against causal determinism by contrasting Paul Ricoeur's phenomenological and hermeneutic approach to the issue with the thorough analysis of the topic offered in a recent book by the pragmatist Owen Flanagan. The author provides his own own assessment of these thinkers, which I agree with, since I happen to be the person who wrote the book. The footnotes are interesting and Ricoeur's theory is summarized pretty effectively. ... Read more

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The most accessible of Ricoeur's early texts, Fallible Man offers an introduction to phenomenological method. ... Read more

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Recognition, though it figures profoundly in our understanding of objects and persons, identity and ideas, has never before been the subject of a single, sustained philosophical inquiry. This work, by one of contemporary philosophy's most distinguished voices, pursues recognition through its various philosophical guises and meanings--and, through the "course of recognition," seeks to develop nothing less than a proper hermeneutics of mutual recognition.

Originally delivered as lectures at the Institute for the Human Sciences at Vienna, the essays collected here consider recognition in three of its forms. The first chapter, focusing on knowledge of objects, points to the role of recognition in modern epistemology; the second, concerned with what might be called the recognition of responsibility, traces the understanding of agency and moral responsibility from the ancients up to the present day; and the third takes up the problem of recognition and identity, which extends from Hegel's discussion of the struggle for recognition through contemporary arguments about identity and multiculturalism. Throughout, Paul Ricoeur probes the significance of our capacity to recognize people and objects, and of self-recognition and self-identity in relation to the gift of mutual recognition. Drawing inspiration from such literary texts as The Odyssey and Oedipus at Colonus, and engaging some of the classic writings of the Continental philosophical tradition--by Kant, Hobbes, Hegel, Augustine, Locke, and Bergson--The Course of Recognition ranges over vast expanses of time and subject matter and in the process suggests a number of highly insightful ways of thinking through the major questions of modern philosophy.

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