"To explain more is to understand better". This is the mantra by which French philosopher Paul Ricoeur lived and worked, establishing himself as one of the twentieth century's most lucid and broad-ranging critical thinkers. A prisoner of war at 27, Ricoeur was also Dean of Paris X Nanterre during the student disturbances of 1968. In later years he became an outspoken champion of social justice. In work as in life, Ricoeur was committed to the challenges of conflict and the prospect of authentic resolution. Deeply indebted to phenomenology and the hermeneutical tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer, Ricoeur was also an advocate of structural linguistics, of psychoanalysis, and a rare conversant with the Anglo-American analytic tradition. This volume explores how literature and the conflicts of literary-theoretical debate inform Ricoeur's theory of imagination and understanding, and how Ricoeur's unique mode of literary reflection resolves the conflicts of literature's theoretical heyday, presaging a new direction for literary studies.

Paul Ricoeur is one of the most important modern literary theorists and a philosopher of world renown. This collection brings together his published articles, papers, reviews, and interviews that focus on literary theory and criticism. The first of four sections includes early pieces that explore the philosophical foundations for a post-structural hermeneutics. The second contains reviews and essays in which Ricoeur engages in debate over some of the central themes of literary theory, including figuration/configuration and narrativity. In the third section are later essays on post-structuralist hermeneutics, and in the fourth, interviews in which he discusses text, language, and myths. Mario Valdés provides an introduction to the literary theories of Paul Ricoeur and the works in this collection particularly. He also includes a complete bibliography of Ricoeur's works that have appeared in English.

The thought of Paul Ricoeur continues its profound effect on theology, religious studies and biblical interpretation. The 28 papers contained in this volume constitute the most comprehensive overview of Ricoeur's writings in religion since 1970. Ricoeur's hermeneutical orientation and his sensitivity to the mystery of religious language offer fresh insight to the transformative potential of sacred literature, including the Bible.

Ricoeur’s theory of productive imagination in previously unpublished lectures. The eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur was devoted to the imagination. These previously unpublished lectures offer Ricoeur’s most significant and sustained reflections on creativity as he builds a new theory of imagination through close examination, moving from Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant to Ryle, Price, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Sartre. These thinkers, he contends, underestimate humanity’s creative capacity. While the Western tradition generally views imagination as derived from the reproductive example of the image, Ricoeur develops a theory about the mind’s power to produce new realities. Modeled most clearly in fiction, this productive imagination, Ricoeur argues, is available across conceptual domains. His theory provocatively suggests that we are not constrained by existing political, social, and scientific structures. Rather, our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world.

Identifying Selfhood provides the first sustained treatment of the development of Paul Ricoeur's decentered formulation of selfhood from his earliest works to his most recent. For Henry Venema, Ricoeur's affirmation that consciousness is always rooted in the signs, symbols, and texts that precede the hermeneutical project of self-recovery and discovery provides the thread that links all of Ricoeur's philosophical inquiries together. However, as Venema argues, Ricoeur's hermeneutic is caught up in the semantics of identity to such an extent that selfhood is confused and often equated with the textuality of the reflective process and is never dealt with on the intimate level of the reflexive structure of selfhood in relation to otherness. In the end, Ricoeur's formulation of alterity identifies the other within the circle of the self-same.

Imagination and Chance illuminates the different philosophical projects that animate Ricoeur's hermeneutics and Derrida's deconstruction. Basic concepts in Ricouer such as discourse, metaphor and symbol, and tradition are examined, and texts by Derrida including "White Mythology," Introduction to Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, and "The Double Session" are analyzed. The book also includes a previously untranslated round table discussion between Ricoeur and Derrida.

Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of the Imagination argues Ricoeur's development of the philosophy of the creative imagination is vital to Ricoeur's articulation of a critical hermeneutics. Herein lies Ricoeur's hermeneutical contribution to the philosophy of religion and the problem of interpreting primary religious texts that utilize plurivocal forms of language. Evans clarifies that it is through Ricoeur's studies of metaphor and narrative that he assesses and explicates the subversive power of the creative imagination in terms of the philosophy of language. Dr. Evans systematizes this theme of the philosophy of the imagination from Fallible Man, the early work of Ricoeur to the more recent publication of Time and Narrative.