Paul Ricoeur is one of the most wide-ranging thinkers to emerge in the twentieth century. He has developed a unique 'theory of reading' or hermeneutics, which extends far beyond the reading of literary works to build into a theory for the reading of 'life'. For this reason, his work has impacted not only upon literary studies, but upon such disciplines as philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, religion, legal studies and politics.
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.
Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation.
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.
Paul Ricoeur is described in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "one of the leading French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century." This little book collects his thoughts on the subject of translation, and is vintage Ricoeur. He uses the topic to reflect on some of the perennial problems posed by translation, including the transmission of earlyGreek Philosophy to the Renaissance, interpretations of the Bible amongst diverse religious traditions (no small issue at the moment), and the way translations of the same text reflect important cultural dynamics at work across different periods, leading to quite different meanings springing from the same book. There are also discussions of some contemporary figures, such as Umberto Eco, and the whole underscored by Ricoeur's point that there is a paradox at the hear of translation: impossible in theory but effective in practice.
One of the most distinguished and prolific philosophers of his generation. –The Daily Telegraph
