The path Husserl entered upon at the beginning of his philosophical writ ings turned out to be the beginning of a long, tedious way. Throughout his life he constantly comes to grips with the fundamental problems which set him upon this path. Beginning with the logical level of meaning, laboring through the idealism of the transcendental phenomenology of the period between Ideas I to the Meditations, in search for the ever more originary, he finally arrived at the level of the Lebenswelt. It was this later focus on the ever more originary, the source, the foundation of meaning which led him finally to the horizon of meaning and the genesis of meaning in the Lebenswelt period. This later period allows for a quasi wedding of his phenomenology with some adaptation of existentialism. But this union called for an adaptation of Husserl's logistic prejudice. The period of the Lebenswelt allows many of the later phenomenologists to speak of the failure of the brackets in their extreme exclusion and to allow for a link between man and his world in the Lebenswelt. This link is at the source of the ontological investigations and theories which arise from the phenomenological movement. However, there is the possibility of many tensions in such an endeavor since the study of being can be most abstract and most concrete.

Paul Ricoeur’s contribution to the theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics, is considerable: he ranks among the masters of this discipline alongside Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer. In addition to major works like The Conflict of Interpretations, he wrote many articles and shorter texts which deserve to be discovered and rediscovered. These allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the development of his work over time and to appreciate the full range of his contribution. Some of the texts examine the nature of metaphor while others guide the reader through the many challenges of the hermeneutic problem - from the symbol to the text, then to the text as action, taking full account of the ethical implications. Here one encounters Ricoeur’s reflections on the future of hermeneutics and his abiding concern to explore the relations between hermeneutics and analytical philosophy. Ricoeur’s contribution to biblical hermeneutics has also been decisive. Two masterful studies in this volume attest to Ricoeur’s attempt to explore the relations between revelation and truth, on the one hand, and between myths of salvation and reason, on the other. This book - the second volume of Ricoeur’s writings and lectures - brings together texts which appeared between 1972 and 2006. It is published under the auspices of Le Fonds Ricoeur.

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.

Paul Ricoeur was one of the most prolific thinkers of the twentieth century. There have been many books written on Ricoeur's philosophy, but very little is available on his theological trajectory and its connection to biblical interpretation. Gregory Laughery's Living Hermeneutics aims to fill that lacuna. He brings to life the diverse ways in which Ricoeur's work can contribute to and open up viable possibilities for critiquing both modernist and postmodernist orientations, while offering new theological and hermeneutical directions for understanding the text, the reader, and the world. This book is aimed at a broad student audience, as well as the interested general reader who would like to know more about Ricoeur.

This book investigates the importance of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and poetics in rethinking humanities. In particular, Ricoeur’s insights on reference as refiguration and his idea of interpretation as a triadic process (which consists of mimesis 1 – prefiguration, mimesis 2 – configuration, and mimesis 3 – refiguration) will be applied to philosophy of science and to literary and historical texts. It will be shown that Ricoeur’s idea of emplotment can be extended and applied to scientific, literary and historical texts. This multidisciplinary research will include philosophy of science, metaphysics, hermeneutics, and literary theory.

The series has sold over 50,000 copies to date and generated almost £200K of revenue Ricoeur is almost up there with Zizek and Derrida in terms of big names We publish his The Rule of Metaphor in Routledge Classics Richard Kearney has written an introduction to add a bit of background We had a rival bidder for English language rights in Chicago UP