Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body extends the scope of Paul Ricoeur’s reflections and analyses of the body as one’s own through explorations into the ethical, cultural, and affective dimensions of our corporeal existence. Starting with the fact that each of us has a place in the world by reason of our mode of incarnation as flesh, the contributors to this volume address a range of diverse themes in which the lived body figures. Edited by Roger W. H. Savage, this book investigates the construction of narrative identities and the social assignment of gender and race, the passions and an ethics of respect, affect theory, feeling, the carnal imagination, and the cultural and social milieu that comprises the conditions of our embodiment as subjects who have deeply held convictions and beliefs. By acknowledging that the lived body is irreducible to an object in the world, the essays in this volume have a common point: our assurance in acting and suffering is rooted in the mode of our incarnate existence as fragile yet capable human beings.

This book offers a unique account of the role imagination plays in advancing the course of freedom’s actualization. It draws on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology of the capable human being as the staging ground for an extended inquiry into the challenges of making freedom a reality within the history of humankind. This book locates the abilities we exercise as capable human beings at the heart of a sustained analysis and reflection on the place of the idea of justice in a hermeneutics for which every expectation regarding rights, liberties, and opportunities must be a hope for humanity as a whole. The vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricoeur figures in a philosophy of the will provides an initial touchstone for a hermeneutics of liberation rooted in a philosophical anthropology for which the pathétique of human misery is its non- or pre-philosophical source. By setting the idea of the humanity in each of us against the backdrop of the necessity of preserving the tension between the space of our experiences and the horizons of our expectations, the book identifies the ethical and political dimensions of the idea of justice’s federating force with the imperative of respect. Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophical Anthropology as Hermeneutics of Liberation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics.

This book for the first time brings together considerations upon the feminine in relation to Paul Ricœur’s thinking. The collection of renowned scholars who have published extensively on Ricoeur and promising younger scholars together shows the rich potential of his thought for feminist theory, without failing to critically scrutinize it and to show its limitations with respect to thinking gender differences. In the first part, “Ricœur, Women, and Gender,” Ricœur’s work is taken as the starting point for the reflection upon the position of women and the feminine, and for rethinking the notion of universalism. In the second part, “Ricœur in Dialogue,”his work is related to feminist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser and to the work of artist Kara Walker. These dialogues aim at thinking through socially relevant notions such as discourse, recognition, and justice. In the third part, “Ricœur and Feminist Theology,” Ricœurian notions and ideas are the starting point for new perspectives upon feminist theology. The insights developed in this book will be of particular value to students and scholars of Ricœur, feminist theory, and the limits of hermeneutics and phenomenology.

The topic of revelation is fundamental to any account of religious experience, playing a special role in the Judeo-Christian tradition where the texts of Scripture are regarded as revealed. Yet, any reflection on the revealed status of a given message or text requires interpretation. Paul Ricœur, one of the most important hermeneutic philosophers of the twentieth century, provides crucial insights on how such interpretation might proceed and what it might mean for texts to be revealed. Edited by Christina M. Gschwandtner, Paul Ricoeur, Philosophical Hermeneutics, and the Question of Revelation brings together major scholars of Ricœur’s work on the topic of revelation, showing both the role it already plays in his work and how his thinking might be taken further. Several contributors trace the development of his thought in regard to the concept of revelation. Others discuss the revelatory dimensions of Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the self, especially for such issues as identity, trauma, and forgiveness. Several contributions also place his work in conversation with that of other seminal thinkers on the topic of revelation, such as Karl Barth and Paul Tillich.

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon calls attention to the dynamic interaction that takes place between hermeneutics and phenomenology in Ricoeur’s thought. It could be said that Ricoeur’s thought is placed under a twofold demand: between the rigor of the text and the requirements of the phenomenon. The rigor of the text calls for fidelity to what the text actually says, while the requirement of the phenomenon is established by the Husserlian call to return “to the things themselves.” These two demands are interwoven insofar as there is a hermeneutic component of the phenomenological attempt to go beyond the surface of things to their deeper meaning, just as there is a phenomenological component of the hermeneutic attempt to establish a critical distance toward the world to which we belong. For this reason, Ricoeur’s thought involves a back and forth movement between the text and the phenomenon. Although this double movement was a theme of many of Ricoeur’s essays in the middle of his career, the essays in this book suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology remains implicit throughout his work. The chapters aim to highlight, in much greater detail, how this back and forth movement between phenomenology and hermeneutics takes place with respect to many important philosophical themes, including the experience of the body, history, language, memory, personal identity, and intersubjectivity.

In her remarkable book, Sondra Horton Fraleigh examines and describes dance through her consciousness of dance as an art, through the experience of dancing, and through the existential and phenomenological literature on the lived body. She describes, with performance photographs, specific imagery in dance masterworks by Doris Humphrey, Anna Sokolow, Viola Farber, Nina Weiner, and Garth Fagan.

In Paul Ricoeur's Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology: Vulnerability, Capability, Justice, Marc de Leeuw argues that Ricoeur’s philosophical project integrates the anthropological tradition while renewing its importance as a hermeneutic anthropology of human capability. Ricoeur posits that our cogito is neither its own absolute master, nor fully transparent to itself, inflicting a “wound” (brisé) and fracturing the center of Cartesian self-certainty. But the Nietzschean disillusionment that ensues does not simply amount to a victorious anti-cogito; it opens another path towards self-understanding. In place of the direct route of intuition is found a more complex way forward, one guided by interpretation. The task of philosophical anthropology is to understand the human through its interpretative, critical, and imaginative ability as well as its capacity to act towards, with, and for others; the interpretation of the world in front of us, the interpretation of “who we are,” and the interpretation of what it means to be among others (as "other selves") coalesces in an anthropology that binds the question of the self to a moral, ethical, and political project, one aiming to reflect our existence-in-common. For Ricoeur, the basic question of our subjective and normative “standing” demands a fundamental response—a response toward our own otherness and to responsibilities triggered by the appeal of Others. In both cases, our vulnerability is inescapable: we can never have an absolute self-knowledge nor an absolute knowledge of Others. Ricoeur turns this fundamental aporia into an affirmative philosophical anthropology of human action, attestation, and justice.

Cinema is a sensuous object, but in our presence it becomes also a sensing, sensual, sense-making subject. This title challenges basic assumptions of current film theory that reduce film to an object of vision and the spectator to a victim of a deterministic cinematic apparatus.

In October 2005, UNESCO Member States adopted by acclamation the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. For the first time in the history of bioethics, some 190 countries committed themselves and the international community to respect and apply fundamental ethical principles related to medicine, the life sciences and associated technologies. This publication provides a new impetus to the dissemination of the Declaration, and is part of the organisation's continuous effort to contribute to the understanding of its principles worldwide. The authors, who were almost all involved in the elaboration of the text of the Declaration, were asked to respond on each article: Why was it included? What does it mean? How can it be applied? Their responses shed light on the historical background of the text and its evolution throughout the drafting process. They also provide a reflection on its relevance to previous declarations and bioethical literature, and its potential interpretation and application in challenging and complex bioethical debates.

This introductory study surveys the entire range of Ricoeur's work, placing it within the context of post-structuralism. Includes a discussion of Time and Narrative and shows how Ricoeur's work links European and American traditions.