From Vulnerability to Promise

Reviews / Votes

This is a timely and engaging volume on the hermeneutic conversation between affectivity, narrativity, and finitude in the work of Paul Ricoeur. It marks an invaluable contribution to the understanding of our fundamental human vulnerability. -- Richard Kearney, Boston College It is rightly argued that women scholars often contribute to intellectual domains in three overlapping ways: by gaining an equal voice within a discipline, by offering a new voice that raises original issues within the discipline, and by providing a different voice that challenges and rethinks the discipline. All three are evident in this important text, where ten women philosophers build on and respond to the work of Paul Ricoeur. Arguing against historically prevailing theories, the contributions argue for a self that is relational both internally-combining the rational and the affective, reason and embodiment, the voluntary and the involuntary, capability and fragility, narrative continuity and discontinuity-and externally-with others in horizontal recognition, including those often excluded and extending to relations with nature. In awareness of our finitude, the goal is situated practical wisdom. It is a tribute to Ricoeur that the authors find in his thought a sufficiently sympathetic sensibility that he is worth engaging, even as they enrich, extend, and restructure his work. The collection is also to be commended for bringing to readers in English the voices of talented women philosophers at varying stages of scholarly entry and of very diverse international and language backgrounds. -- George Taylor, University of Pittsburgh Exploring the question of the incarnated self and its existential condition of finitude in Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology and starting from it, by giving a voice to women philosophers, is the challenge this book wants to address . In a highly innovative and convincing manner, Beatriz Contreras Tasso and Sophie-Jan Arrien introduce us to the plural, embodied and situated gaze of women philosophers - from different generations, backgrounds, countries and languages - on phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches to the central questions of affectivity, the lived body, narrative identity, the vulnerability and capability of the self at work in Ricoeur's philosophy. -- Jean-Luc Amalric, EHESS Paris The aim of this timely and invigorating collection of essays is to display how women philosophers have responded to the diversified works of Paul Ricoeur, one of the 20th century's most influential French thinkers ... Thinking with and beyond Ricoeur when taken as a whole, they each are well written, instructive, and meritorious. Highly recommended [for] advanced undergraduates through faculty * CHOICE *