Abstract
Jean Paul Gustave Ricoeur was born on February 27, 1913, at Valence, France. Little is known of his mother, Florentine Favre, who died when he was just seven months old. His father, Jules, was a teacher of English at the local lycée until he was mobilized for French military service in World War I. Jules Ricoeur was killed in the Battle of the Marne on September 26, 1915. Paul Ricoeur and his older sister Alice were thereafter reared by their paternal grandparents in Rennes. The senior Ricoeurs were devout Protestants who reared the children in a strict atmosphere of Bible study, church attendance, and reading.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
See Charles R. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4–5.
See Charles R. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4-5
Paul Ricoeur, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1995), 8 (hereafter IA). See also Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blarney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 12, 15 (hereafter CAC). See also Françoise Dosse, Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d’une vie (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 18-19 and 58 (hereafter PRSV). Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death in 1927.
Bernard Stevens, L’apprentissage des signes (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1991), 10.
Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 11.
I have indicated something of the continuity of Ricoeur’s ethico-political thought in Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) esp. chapters 2, 3.
Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990); Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) (hereafter OAA). As Ricoeur himself intimates, there is nothing “little” about his “little ethics.” Nonetheless, I will continue to use his phrase. See CAC, 92.
Paul Ricoeur, “Éthique et morale: Visée théologique [sic] et perspective déontologique,” in Ragione pratica liberta normativita, éd. Marcello Sanchez Sorondo (Rome: Herder-Universita Lateranse, 1991), 353 (hereafter EMVT). Obviously, “théologique” is a misprint for “téléologique.” See also OAA, 170, and Ricoeur, “Éthique et morale,” in his Lectures I (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991), 256 (hereafter EM). Ricoeur’s three theses are clearly a rejoinder to John Rawls’s famous claim that the right (or the obligatory) is prior to the good. Ricoeur has recently refined these three theses in “De la morale à l’éthique et aux éthiques,” in his Le Juste 2 (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 2001), 55-68. For a number of instructive remarks about the connection between Ricoeur’s little ethics and other thinkers, see PRSV, 699-755.
Paul Ricoeur, Le Juste (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995), 21 (hereafter LJ).
OAA, 169-71, LJ, 24, and EM, 256. Françoise Dosse finds intimations of Ricoeur’s distinction between ethics and morality already in Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricoeur, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1947). See PRSV, 126.
Ricoeur follows Alasdair MacIntyre in regarding practices as “cooperative activities whose constitutive rules are established socially; the standards of excellence that correspond to them on the level of this or that practice originate much further back than the solitary practitioner”—OAA, 176. He is paraphrasing MacIntyre’s After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 175.
Paul Ricoeur, “Entretien,” in Éthique et responsabilité Paul Ricoeur, ed. Jean-Christophe Aeschlimann (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnierre, 1994), 16 (hereafter “Entretien”). See also Ricoeur, “Interviews,” in Charles Reagan, Paul Ricoeur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 113-14. Recall also Arendt’s view of the transgressive nature of action in her The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. 240-41.
See Paul Ricoeur, “Practical Reason,” in his From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blarney and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 198.
On the notion of the tragedy of action, see OAA, 241-54, as well as Ricoeur, “The Fragility of Political Language,” Philosophy Today 31 (1987): 40 and Ricoeur, “From Metaphysics to Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 40 (1996): 458. John Rawls, following Isaiah Berlin, also admits that no system of social or political institutions can support all worthwhile moral and political values. See Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993): 57.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dauenhauer, B.P. (2002). Paul Ricoeur: The Just as Ingredient in the Good. In: Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 47. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6082-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9924-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive