Critique and Conviction
Conversations with Francois Azouvi and Marc de Launay
1. Edition December 1997
208 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
In this new book Paul Ricoeur - one of the greatest contemporary
philosophers - offers a personal reflection on his life and on the
themes which have preoccupied him over the course of his career.
Ranging across topics in ethics and metaphysics, psychoanalysis
and hermeneutics, history, politics and religion, Critique and
Conviction provides unique insight into the ideas and sources
of influence which have shaped Ricoeur's philosophical approach and
defined his core concerns. Ricoeur also discusses in detail a
number of topics about which he has not written extensively before,
including questions of aesthetics and current affairs.
This remarkable testimony by one of the leading philosophers of
the twentieth century will be of great interest to students of
philosophy, theology, literary theory and social and political
theory.
1. From Valence to Nanterre.
2. France/United States: Two incomparable histories.
3. From psychoanalysis to the question of the self, or thirty
years of philosophical work.
4. Politics and totalitarianism.
5. Duty of memory, duty of justice.
6. Education and secularism.
7. Biblical readings and meditations.
8. Aesthetic experience.
Notes.
Paul Ricoeur to reveal in his responses to their always sensitive
but probing question more of himself both as a philosopher and as a
man - and the two are evidently very much one and the same - than
might have been imagined possible for one who, for all his fame and
manifold public commitments, comes through as such a naturally
modest and private person. One could ask for no better or clearer
introduction to Ricoeur's many and diverse writings and to the
preoccupations of his long and endlessly active life than this, his
own retrospective account of them. Ricoeur is a thinker of
exceptional intellectual openness, who even now in the ninth decade
of his life, continues to ponder afresh the great central questions
of what it is to be a human being. Even those whose first encounter
with him comes as they read this book, can hardly fail to derive
from it not only the stimulus to re-engage with these questions for
themselves but, at the same time, a deep admiration for a thinker
of extraordinary range, and even without knowing him in person, a
genuinely affectionate respect for a remarkable man.' Professor
Alan Montefiore, Balliol College, Oxford
'Critique and Conviction is a strange genre - an
autobiography unfolded in a series of thematically organized
conversations. It succeeds brilliantly. The life recounted in these
pages - with Ricoeur's breadth of philosophical, theological and
political concerns, the positive ecumenical spirit with which he
approaches every thinker who engages him, and the openness and
directness of the conversational form - make these reflections an
inspiration for the aspiring philosopher, and for the seasoned
academic, a reminder of what a fully engaged intellectual life
looks like. Ricoeur is unsurpassed in bridging the Anglo-American /
Continental divide over a vast range of topics: psychoanalysis and
the self, time, politics, justice, memory, responsibility,
secularism, theology and aesthetic experience. As both a
philosopher and a religious thinker, Ricoeur has always, as he
says, walked on two legs. As he moves off the world stage on
tiptoe, this book gives more than a glimpse of his exemplary
achievement in marrying conviction and critique.' Professor
David Wood, Department of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
'It is one of the best introductions to Paul Ricoeur's work in
its range, its coherence, its openness and its wise humanity.'
Times Literary Supplement
