Review:
a Francois Azouvi and Marc de Launay have somehow persuaded Paul Ricoeur to reveal in his responses to their always sensitive but probing question more of himself both as a philosopher and as a man -- and the two are evidently very much one and the same -- than might have been imagined possible for one who, for all his fame and manifold public commitments, comes through as such a naturally modest and private person. One could ask for no better or clearer introduction to Ricoeura s many and diverse writings and to the preoccupations of his long and endlessly active life than this, his own retrospective account of them. Ricoeur is a thinker of exceptional intellectual openness, who even now in the ninth decade of his life, continues to ponder afresh the great central questions of what it is to be a human being. Even those whose first encounter with him comes as they read this book, can hardly fail to derive from it not only the stimulus to re--engage with these questions for themselves but, at the same time, a deep admiration for a thinker of extraordinary range, and even without knowing him in person, a genuinely affectionate respect for a remarkable man.a Professor Alan Montefiore, Balliol College, Oxford a Critique and Conviction is a strange genre -- an autobiography unfolded in a series of thematically organized conversations. It succeeds brilliantly. The life recounted in these pages -- with Ricoeura s breadth of philosophical, theological and political concerns, the positive ecumenical spirit with which he approaches every thinker who engages him, and the openness and directness of the conversational form -- make these reflections an inspiration for the aspiring philosopher, and for the seasoned academic, a reminder of what a fully engaged intellectual life looks like. Ricoeur is unsurpassed in bridging the Anglo--American / Continental divide over a vast range of topics: psychoanalysis and the self, time, politics, justice, memory, responsibility, secularism, theology and aesthetic experience. As both a philosopher and a religious thinker, Ricoeur has always, as he says, walked on two legs. As he moves off the world stage on tiptoe, this book gives more than a glimpse of his exemplary achievement in marrying conviction and critique.a Professor David Wood, Department of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University a It is one of the best introductions to Paul Ricoeura s work in its range, its coherence, its openness and its wise humanity.a Times Literary Supplement
About the Author:
Paul Ricoeur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
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