Reading Ricoeur through Law, edited by Marc de Leeuw, George H. Taylor, and Eileen Brennan, is the first collection of essays solely focused on Ricoeur’s thinking about law, bringing together both established and emerging scholars to offer a systematic and critical examination of Ricoeur’s legal thinking. The chapters not only explore the specific contribution Ricoeur makes to the field of jurisprudence but also examine how Ricoeur’s work on law fits, complements, or changes his overall anthropology, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The book provides a complex insight into how law, ethics, and politics intertwine both from within law as normative rule setting, as well as through the wider social-political and historical context in which law and legal institutions affect our inter-subjective and communal life as lived “with and for others in just institutions.” The collection also makes available in English “The Just between the Legal and the Good,” a key text in Ricoeur’s reflections about law and justice. The core topics of this collection are rights, justice, responsibility, judging, interpretation, argumentation, punishment, and authority, but contributors also offer original insights in how Ricoeur’s philosophical reconceptualization of symbolism, action, ideology, narrative, selfhood, testimony, history, trauma, reconciliation, justice, and forgiveness can be made productive for our understanding of law and legal institutions.

Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur were two of the most important hermeneutical philosophers of the twentieth century. Gadamer single-handedly revived hermeneutics as a philosophical field with his many essays and his masterpiece, Truth and Method. Ricoeur famously mediated the Gadamer-Habermas debate and advanced his own hermeneutical philosophy through a number of books addressing social theory, religion, psychoanalysis and political philosophy. This book brings Gadamer and Ricoeur into a hermeneutical conversation with each other through some of their most important commentators. Twelve leading scholars deliver contemporary assessments of the history and promise of hermeneutical philosophy, providing focused discussion on the work of these two key hermeneutical thinkers. The book shows how the horizons of their thought at once support and question each other and how, in many ways, the work of these two pioneering philosophers defines the issues and agendas for the new century.

The essays in this book contain some of Paul Ricoeur's most fascinating ruminations on the nature of justice and the law. His thoughts ranging across a number of topics and engaging the work of thinkers both classical and contemporary, Ricoeur offers a series of important reflections on the juridical and the philosophical concepts of right and the space between moral theory and politics.

Maria Duffy describes Paul Ricoeur's narrative theory of memory and addresses central conceptual and methodological issues in his theory of forgiveness and reconciliation. As the many Truth Commissions around the world illustrate, revisiting the past has a positive benefit in steering history in a new direction after protracted violence. A second deeper strand in the book is the connection between Ricoeur and John Paul II. Both lived through the worst period of modern European history (Ricoeur a prisoner of war during WWII and John Paul, who suffered under the communist regime). Both have written on themes of memory and identity and share a mutual concern for the future of Europe and the preservation of the 'Christian' identity of the Continent as well as the promotion of peace and a civilization of love. The book brings together their shared vision, culminating in the award to Ricoeur by John Paul II of the Paul VI medal for theology.

In Reading Ricoeur, fourteen well-known scholars interpret, evaluate, and criticize the works of Paul Ricoeur, one of the twentieth century's most important and far-reaching philosophers. The contributors discuss Ricoeur's entire philosophical career: from his existentialist-phenomenology of the 1940s and '50s; his hermeneutics and critique of structuralism in the 1960s and '70s; his narrative and moral philosophy of the 1980s; his political and legal philosophy of the 1990s; his recent work on memory, forgiveness, and recognition; as well as his enduring interests in religious language and the problem of evil. The contributors not only explain the central concepts and structures of Ricoeur's philosophy, but they also bring him into dialogue with his contemporaries, including Sartre, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Rawls, and Lyotard. Reading Ricoeur demonstrates the central role of Paul Ricoeur in the development of twentieth-century philosophy. Book jacket.

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.

Refiguring the Sacred: Conversations with Paul Ricoeur offers perspectives on the twenty-one papers collected by Mark I. Wallace in Paul Ricoeur’s Figuring the Sacred, translated by David Pellauer; this new collection by Joseph A. Edelheit, James Moore, and Mark I. Wallace gives Ricoeur scholars an opportunity to reflect and engage on critical issues of Ricoeur’s religious ideas. Contributions by several significant Ricoeur scholars prompt questions and invite new conversations more than 15 years after Ricoeur’s death. His life-long engagement with texts illuminates his embrace of the Sacred; his significant thinking and writings on Religious imagination, Theology, the Bible, Hope, and Praxis are all ideas that beg more reading, reflection, and refiguring of our understanding of Ricoeur. Wallace brings two additional essays that could not be included in his original collection and reflects on why they are essential to our understanding of Ricoeur and the Sacred. Refiguring the Sacred also provides a model of the interfaith and multidisciplinary dialogue that were foundational to Paul Ricoeur’s scholarship.

This unique edited collection illuminates Paul Ricoeur's engagement with Scripture. The contributors include one of the primary translators, several who studied at the University of Chicago, and some of this generation's noted Ricoeur scholars. The essays discuss Hebrew and Christian Scripture, hermeneutics, and biblical scholarship.

Paul Ricoeur and Environmental Philosophy expands the scope of Ricoeur's philosophy, especially his hermeneutics, to issues of environmental philosophy and our contemporary environmental crisis. David Utsler argues that, although Ricoeur himself was not an environmental philosopher, his work provides frameworks to reconsider our way of being-in-the-world as it pertains to our relationship with the environment. The unprecendented environmental crisis can be thought of as the result of interpretations—bad ones—and the crisis we now face requires the task of new and creative interpretation. This book discusses the ways in which Ricoeur's hermeneutics has the potential to restructure the discourse and dialogue surrounding environmental issues, and to creatively mediate the many conflicting interpretations that call for resolution. Utsler does not claim this text to be a comprehensive application of Ricoeur's work to environmental philosophy, as he believes there is still a great deal more of Ricoeur's philosophy from which to draw to enrich the growing field of environmental hermeneutics.

At the time of his death in 2005, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. In more than half a century of writing about the essential questions of human life, Ricoeur’s thought encompassed a vast range of wisdom and experience, and he made landmark contributions that would go on to influence later scholars in such areas as phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and theology. Toward the end of his life, Ricoeur began to focus directly on ethical questions that he feared had been overshadowed by his other work; the result was a two-volume collection of essays on justice and the law. The University of Chicago Press published the English translation of the first volume, The Just, to great acclaim in 2000. Now this translation of the second volume, Reflections on the Just, completes the set and makes available to readers the whole of Ricoeur’s meditations on the concept. Consisting of fifteen thematically organized essays, Reflections on the Just continues and expands on the work Ricoeur began in with his “little ethics” in Oneself as Another and The Just. In the preface, he considers what revisions he would make were he to start over and how that is reflected in these essays. The opening part brings phenomenology to bear on ethics; the second group of essays comprises shorter, occasional pieces considering the concept of justice in the works of other philosophers, including Max Weber and Charles Taylor. The final part turns to the specific domains of medicine and the law, examining how concepts of right and justice operate in those realms. Cogent, deeply considered, and fully engaged with the realities of the contemporary world, Reflections on the Just is an essential work for understanding the development of Ricoeur’s thought in his final years.