Reflections on the Just

by Ricoeur, Paul; Pellauer, David

• ISBN13: 9780226713458
• ISBN10: 0226713458
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-06-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

At the time of his death in 2005, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. In more than half a century of writing about the essential questions of human life, Ricoeur's thought encompassed a vast range of wisdom and experience, and he made landmark contributions that would go on to influence later scholars in such areas as phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and theology. Toward the end of his life, Ricoeur began to focus directly on ethical questions that he feared had been overshadowed by his other work; the result was a two-volume collection of essays on justice and the law. The University of Chicago Press published the English translation of the first volume,The Just, to great acclaim in 2000. Now this translation of the second volume,Reflections on the Just, completes the set and makes available to readers the whole of Ricoeur's meditations on the concept. Consisting of fifteen thematically organized essays,Reflections on the Justcontinues and expands on the work Ricoeur began in with his "little ethics" inOneself as AnotherandThe Just. In the preface, he considers what revisions he would make were he to start over and how that is reflected in these essays. The opening part brings phenomenology to bear on ethics; the second group of essays comprises shorter, occasional pieces considering the concept of justice in the works of other philosophers, including Max Weber and Charles Taylor. The final part turns to the specific domains of medicine and the law, examining how concepts of right and justice operate in those realms. Cogent, deeply considered, and fully engaged with the realities of the contemporary world,Reflections on the Justis an essential work for understanding the development of Ricoeur's thought in his final years.

Author Biography

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) was the John Nuveen Professor in the Divinity School, the Department of Philosophy, and the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago. David Pellauer has translated many books for the University of Chicago Press, including Paul Ricoeur's The Just and Memory, History, and Forgetting. He teaches philosophy at DePaul University.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Studies
From the Moral to the Ethical and to Ethics	p. 45
Justice and Truth	p. 58
Autonomy and Vulnerability	p. 72
The Paradox of Authority	p. 91
The Paradigm of Translation	p. 106
Readings
Otfried Hoffe's Principes du Droit	p. 123
The Fundamental Categories in Max Weber's Sociology	p. 133
Bouretz on Weber	p. 149
Antoine Garapon's Le Gardien des Promesses	p. 156
The Fundamental and the Historical: Notes on Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self	p. 168
Exercises
The Difference between the Normal and the Pathological as a Source of Respect	p. 187
The Three Levels of Medical Judgment	p. 198
Decision Making in Medical and Judicial Judgments	p. 213
Justice and Vengeance	p. 223
The Universal and the Historical	p. 232
Epilogue	p. 249
Works Cited	p. 257
Index	p. 261
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