Symbolism of Evil is a Beacon Press publication.

Review ‘The essays which John Thompson has assembled under the title Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences are all taken from Ricoeur’s recent work … The essays have been chosen with care, and the volume has the benefit of an extensive introduction by its editor. It offers a comprehensive and integrated conspectus of Ricoeur’s ideas … I do not think that anyone would fail to find illumination and challenge in reading him.’ Anthony Giddens, The Times Literary Supplement ‘Paul Ricoeur is the most important living representative of phenomenology in France. A prolific writer, his work has exerted considerable influence in several areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of religion, the study of symbolism, of metaphor and language … Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences provides an excellent introduction to Ricoeur’s work, which, by focusing on his more recent writings, will serve to inject his themes and perspectives into the mainstream of inquiry in sociological theory.’ The Times Higher Education Supplement ‘John B. Thompson’s lucid and helpful introduction to this collection of essays includes a brief history of Ricoeur’s career and the thematic focuses of his major works : This selection of essays makes available in one piece Ricoeur’s attempt in the seventies to address the challenges from various intellectual fronts. These confrontations do not present an eclecticism, but rather, constitute a continuous, ongoing, and open intellectual response, addressing not only real philosophical issues dealing especially with interpretation, but issues relevant to the social sciences, psychology, psychoanalysis, theology, and many more disciplines.’ Review of Metaphysics Product Description This is a collection in translation of essays by Paul Ricoeur which presents a comprehensive view of his philosophical hermeneutics, its relation to the views of his predecessors in the tradition and its consequences for the social sciences. The volume has three parts. The studies in the first part examine the history of hermeneutics, its central themes and the outstanding issues it has to confront. In Part II, Ricoeur’s own current, constructive position is developed. A concept of the text is formulated as the implications of the theory are pursued into the domains of sociology, psychoanalysis and history. Many of the essays appear here in English for the first time; the editor’s introduction brings out their background in Ricoeur’s thought and the continuity of his concerns. The volume will be of great importance for those interested in hermeneutics and Ricoeur’s contribution to it, and will demonstrate how much his approach offers to a number of disciplines.

A landmark work, "Memory, History, Forgetting" examines the reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, revealing how this symbiosis influences both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. A momentous achievement in Ricoeur's career, this book provides the crucial link between his "Time and Narrative" and "Oneself as Another", and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.

Time and Narrative builds on Paul Ricoeur's earlier analysis, in The Rule of Metaphor, of semantic innovation at the level of the sentence. Ricoeur here examines the creation of meaning at the textual level, with narrative rather than metaphor as the ruling concern. Ricoeur finds a "healthy circle" between time and narrative: time is humanized to the extent that it portrays temporal experience. Ricoeur proposes a theoretical model of this circle using Augustine's theory of time and Aristotle's theory of plot and, further, develops an original thesis of the mimetic function of narrative. He concludes with a comprehensive survey and critique of modern discussions of historical knowledge, understanding, and writing from Aron and Mandelbaum in the late 1930s to the work of the Annales school and that of Anglophone philosophers of history of the 1960s and 1970s. "This work, in my view, puts the whole problem of narrative, not to mention philosophy of history, on a new and higher plane of discussion."?Hayden White, History and Theory "Superb. . . . A fine point of entrance into the work of one of the eminent thinkers of the present intellectual age."?Joseph R. Gusfield, Contemporary Sociology

Paul Ricoeur has been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of the century. Oneself as Another, the clearest account of his "philosophical ethics," substantiates this position and lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of morals. Focusing on the concept of personal identity, Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of the self that charts its epistemological path and ontological status.