Companion to Ricoeur's Fallible Man

Fallible Man is the second book in Paul Ricoeur’s early trilogy on the will and the most accessible of his early writings. While the descriptive approach of Freedom and Nature set aside all normative questions, Fallible Man removes those brackets to examine the bad will, asking what makes evil a possibility. Combining rigor and originality, Ricoeur locates the possibility of evil in a self that is fundamentally in conflict with itself. Edited by Scott Davidson, A Companion to Ricoeur's Fallible Man clarifies and contextualizes the central arguments developed in Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will, providing insight into his formative influences and themes. The collection gathers an international group of scholars who specialize in Ricoeur’s thought to shed light on an impressive range of themes from Fallible Man that resonate with contemporary debates in philosophy and religion.

The book. . . goes a long way toward filling the need for guidance in tackling this challenging work. The anthology is of the highest scholarly caliber, with incisive, probing, and useful contributions. It is a testament to its larger unity that each of the chapters offers something unique, but generally works in harmony with the rest. . . . This Companion is a rich and substantive guide to an early and pivotal work in Ricoeur's career, rendering visible its unvoiced conversations with Ricoeur's philosophical contemporaries, demonstrating its significant debt to the biblical imagination of Christian mythology, and situating it in the complex weave of Ricoeur's intellectual journey early and late. It should be clear by now that I am recommending it as something close to required reading for anyone who wishes to come to terms with one of Ricoeur's more elusive works. Because its individual chapters each contribute to important aspects of its subject, both in Fallible Man's internal argument and its relation to the larger oeuvre, the collection offers a pleasant exception to academic anthologies that serve as loosely related occasional works around a theme. It will sit on my bookshelf as a durable reference for a key text., This volume, under the direction of Professor Scott Davidson, offers a rich and diverse panorama of contributions devoted to Fallible Man. The reconstruction of Ricoeur’s approach from the four major Kantian questions is very enlightening and gives essential insights to better understand this work., Strictly speaking, it was only with Fallible Man in 1960 that Paul Ricoeur entered into philosophy. We have been waiting for this new companion to Ricoeur’s Fallible Man, which helps to measure both the influence and scope of this key text. Bypassing the often and much developed Paul Ricoeur of hermeneutics, we come to discover or rediscover today the early Ricoeur of "Finitude and Guilt"—and especially of ‘fallibility.’ This ‘companionship’ with Ricoeur convinces us that a finished work can never be understood independently of its origins. This is what this book has the strength and audacity to show., In this volume, editor Scott Davidson has very ably gathered a talented, international pool of Ricoeur scholars – both established and younger – to help illuminate the riches of Fallible Man by means of the very Ricoeurian motif of mediation: mediation of this text in relation both with other thinkers (Husserl, Jaspers, Marcel, Nabert) and with other topics, both within and without Ricoeur’s larger corpus (embodiment, enactivism, evil, fragility, imagination, narrative identity, recognition)., This collection of original essays by leading Ricoeur scholars illuminates Paul Ricoeur’s Fallible Man, the important but not well known link between his first work, Freedom and Nature, and his later books. Scott Davidson, an internationally known Ricoeur scholar, contributes an excellent introduction to this collection of original essays and a chapter showing Jean Nabert’s influence on Ricoeur. This book is an important contribution to Ricoeur studies.

Scott Davidson is professor of philosophy at West Virginia University.