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    Blundell - Book Profile: The New Ricoeur Scholarship - JCRT 4.1

    The New Ricoeur Scholarship

    Book Profiles:
    Richard A. Cohen and James L. Marsh, eds., Ricoeur As Another: The Ethics of Subjectivity. State University of New York Press, 2002. 236 pages, xvi, index.

    John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall, eds. Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. Routledge, 2002’ 290 pages, ix, index.

    Boyd Blundell
    Boston College

    A decade after the appearance of Oneself as Another in English, Ricoeur scholarship is now being taken to a new level. No fewer than eight books on Ricoeur, along with dozens of articles, have been published in the last two years, with more due to appear as Ricoeur approaches his ninetieth birthday. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Oneself is, as Charles Reagan puts it in the opening essay of the Cohen and Marsh volume, “Ricoeur’s most elegantly written, clearly organized and closely argued work,” and thus merits the attention from the perspective of pure philosophical scholarship. But I would suggest that something deeper is at work. Ricoeur, more than any other active philosopher, bridges gaps, performing a synthetic task in an era dominated by analytical and deconstructive projects. Ricoeur operates in the hermeneutical “between” - between analytical and continental thought, between ethics and morals, between theology and philosophy, between critique and conviction - and there is a growing appetite for carefully crafted arguments that might help us _re_construct our shattered modernity into something viable, if still wounded. With the publication of Ricoeur as Another and Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Philosophy, we have the first attempts at an appropriation of this daunting project that Ricoeur has begun.

    Boyd Blundell is a doctoral candidate in Theological Ethics at Boston College. His dissertation examines the implications of Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity for Christian anthropology. His publications include “Theological Manners,” in Theology and the Social Sciences and “At Arm’s Length: Theology, Hermeneutics, and Ricoeur’s Double Life,” in Between the Human and the Divine.

    ’ 2002 Boyd Blundell. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
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