Ricoeur Across The Disciplines

This multidisciplinary investigation facilitates a new conversation between Ricoeur scholars and those working in a variety of domains.

The essays in Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education: The Just University discuss diverse ways that Paul Ricoeur’s work provides hopeful insight and necessary provocation that should inform the task and mission of the modern university in the changing landscape of Higher Education. This volume gathers interdisciplinary scholars seeking to reestablish the place of justice as the central function of higher education in the twenty-first century. The contributors represent diverse backgrounds, including teachers, scholars, and administrators from R1 institutions, seminary and divinity schools as well as undergraduate teaching colleges. This collection, edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Jeffrey F. Keuss, offers critical and practical visions for the renewal of higher education. The first part of the book provides an internal examination of the university system and details how Ricoeur’s thinking assists on pragmatics from syllabus design to final exams to daily teaching. The second portion of the book examines the Just University’s role as a social institution within the broader cultural world and looks at how Ricoeur’s description of values informs how the university works relative to religious belief, prisons, and rural poverty.

Paul Ricoeur is one of the most wide-ranging thinkers to emerge in the twentieth century. He has developed a unique 'theory of reading' or hermeneutics, which extends far beyond the reading of literary works to build into a theory for the reading of 'life'. For this reason, his work has impacted not only upon literary studies, but upon such disciplines as philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, religion, legal studies and politics. This introductory guide: * details Ricoeur's most significant contributions to contemporary critical thought * provides an intellectual context to his key ideas * explores the debate around his work on good and evil, psychoanalysis, metaphor, narrative, politics and justice * suggests the continuing relevance of Ricoeur's thought and examines the increasing interest in his work across a range of disciplines. Karl Simms also provides a guide to further reading, which offers advice on Ricoeur's publications and relevant secondary texts. Refreshingly clear and impressively comprehensive, Paul Ricoeur is the essential guide to an essential theorist.

Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur: Between Fragility and Hope creates a dialogue between Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy and the interpretation of human ritual practices, especially as such practices are manifested within the context of Christian liturgy. In the first part of the book, Christina M. Gschwandtner shows that Ricœur’s account of religion would be deepened if it were to take into account not only the biblical texts but also forms of liturgical expression and ritual actions. She challenges Ricœur’s early reading of the symbol and second naïveté, broadens his interpretation of biblical texts and faith to consider religious actions more fully, and suggests that ritual can enhance human capacities. The second part of the book employs Ricœur’s hermeneutics in order to shed light on the analysis of liturgy, demonstrating that his accounts of truth, of the world of the text, of religious language, of the imagination, and of the formation of identity are all eminently applicable to liturgical experience. Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur shows that one of the most significant themes in Ricœur’s work—the tension between fragility and hope—is especially helpful for understanding what liturgy does and how it functions. Seeing how liturgy and ritual configure fragility and hope also enriches Ricœur’s account of the role and function of religion in human experience.

This book discusses the political philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. More precisely, it offers a sustained engagement with Ricoeur's political thought in a way that demonstrates both the significance of the political in his own thinking throughout his career, and how Ricoeur's understanding of the political offers something valuable to current discussions in political philosophy. A second goal is to begin to fill a gap in Ricoeur studies and situate his work on political ethics more fully in contemporary discussions about political thought. In this way, Ricoeur can be seen as a figure pertinent to recent trends in political philosophy that make political thinking more realistic to the conditions for political life. The various essays in the book move along intersecting but different trajectories. First, as some of these essays attest, the concept of the political is a pervasive theme that runs throughout Ricoeur's corpus. In this way a theme throughout the book examines this notion of the political, as well as how it relates to his more well-known work in other areas. Second, and related, the historical understanding of perennial issues in political philosophy are most often updated by those standing in the lineage of those who have come before. As such, Ricoeur's hermeneutical orientation has moved him to engage contemporaries who attempt to "think forward" in various ways this tradition for current situations. Unlike most who engage in political thought, Ricoeur goes where others dare not, namely, to those who appear to be opponents but, as he shows, offer perspectives worth more consideration in the name of the best of political thinking. In this light, Ricoeur's hermeneutical orientation is again a unique framework for understanding the nature of political engagement, an orientation in what follows that highlights the ways that Ricoeur and a Ricoeurian perspective cross philosophical orientations to develop a unique understanding of political thought that is different.

In this important new book, Brian Gregor gives a comprehensive account of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of religion, which focuses on the regeneration of human capability. Gregor documents the thinkers, movements, and themes that shaped Ricoeur’s thought and gives a critical examination of Ricoeur’s philosophical interpretation of religion.

From Ricoeur to Action engages with the thinking of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) in order to propose innovative responses to 21st-century problems actively contributing to global conflict. Ricoeur's ability to draw from a diverse field of philosophers and theologians and to provide mediation to seemingly irreconcilable views often has both explicit and implicit practical application to socio-political questions. Here an international team of leading Ricoeur scholars develop critical yet productive responses through the development of Ricoeur's thought with respect to such topics as race, environmental ethics, technology, political utopia and reinterpreting religion. Representing a new generation of Ricoeur scholarship that attempts to move beyond an exegetical engagement with his philosophy, this collection of original essays examines key problems in the 21st-century and the ways in which Ricoeur's philosophy understands the subtleties of these problems and is able to offer a productive response. As such it presents an elucidation of the practical significance of Ricoeur's thinking and an innovative contribution to resolving socio-political conflicts in the 21st century.

Moral and political convictions never stand alone. They are always connected to an underlying view of mankind. Liberalism, which currently predominates, is connected to a focus on the free individual. Marxism thinks of man in terms of class struggle, determined by economic relationships. Halfway the twentieth century a powerful alternative came about, by the name of “personalism”. This term stood for a social and political thought based on the concept of the human person. This concept stresses that a human being only becomes human in relationship with others and in a commitment to values that go beyond one’s individual interests. Although personalism has an important influence in western society, in philosophical circles it is often regarded as dead and gone. This tension brings Paul Ricoeur to the fore as an interesting interlocutor, because he was considered a representative of personalism in his younger years, while he later on also supported fatal criticisms of original personalism. This book investigates to what extent the thought of Ricoeur bears a continuing stamp of personalism that allows him to instigate a personalist perspective within contemporary political philosophy. The final result lies on three fronts. First, there is more clarity in the status of personalism in contemporary philosophy, as Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology shows that there are still viable means to elaborate the core ideas of personalism. Second, a personalist kind of republicanism is shown to provide a valuable input in the contemporary philosophical debate on citizenship. Finally, the most tangible result is a deeper understanding of the oeuvre of Ricoeur, in the sense that this book shows that personalism is an important and above all underestimated perspective to understand his entire work.