Paul Ricoeur

This collection of essays is dedicated to the prolific career of Paul Ricoeur. In his lifetime, Ricoeur made significant contributions to many fields, such as theology, aesthetics, narratology, linguistics, and of course, philosophy. Within philosophy alone, he engaged many currents of thoughts, always providing careful and faithful analyses of philosophers while adding his own unique perspectives. Many essays in this anthology revisit Ricoeur’s own works, carefully placing him in his philosophical context, while providing new interpretations of questions that mattered to Ricoeur, such as imagination, forgiveness, justice, and memory. Other essays, honoring Ricoeur’s own approach, bring him to dialogue with new questions, such as globalization, technology, and national memorials.  

In this collection of edited articles, 14 accomplished scholars think with and beyond Paul Ricoeur in an effort to honor and continue his work. This is no small task, since Ricoeur's corpus is extensive, interdisciplinary, and diffuse. An astute student of many schools of thought, particularly phenomenology and hermeneutics, Ricoeur devoted his life to fashioning a philosophical anthropology centered on the capable human being. Here the focus falls on topics that preoccupied Ricoeur during his long and prolific career: language, imagination, narrative, history, religion, ethics, love, justice, memory, forgiveness, hope, and personal identity, to name the most salient. At the same time, contributors creatively extend the philosopher's ideas to engage issues such as technology, globalization, and national memorials. A portrait of intellectual integrity, Ricoeur always acknowledged the contributions of others. He also refused to take methodological short cuts, preferring instead the roundabout route, a rigorous path that required him to consider competing conceptions together in order to mediate between them productively. There is much to celebrate in Ricoeur, and this substantial anthology is eminently worthy of the man it ardently seeks to commemorate. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. 

Farhang Erfani is assistant professor of philosophy at American University and research associate at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa. His first book was about Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricœur, entitled Aesthetics of Autonomy (Lexington Books, 2011). His second book, Iranian Cinema and Philosophy: Shooting Truth, is forthcoming with Palgrave.