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This book examines the distinctive and significant contribution of the great French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur to contemporary debates in ethics and philosophy of religion. James Carter argues that Ricoeur's later writings in particular offer a vision of ethical life that can be understood as a moral religion.
List of contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- 1: Ricoeur's Architectonic of Moral Religion
- 2: Reading Religion as Metaphysical Life in Spinoza
- 3: Reading Religion as Anthropological Life in Aristotle
- 4: Reading Religion as Moral Life in Kant
- 5: The Reflexive Autonomy of Ricoeur
- 6: A Hermeneutics of Ethical Life
- Concluding Remarks: Life, etc.
- Bibliography
About the author
James Carter teaches Philosophy and Religious Studies at Wellington College, UK. He was previously a postdoctoral research fellow in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, and tutor in Philosophy and Theology at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. Dr Carter is the co-editor of Moral Powers, Fragile Beliefs: Essays in Moral and Religious Philosophy (Continuum, 2011)
Summary
In Ricoeur on Moral Religion, James Carter argues that Paul Ricoeur's later philosophical writings provide a highly instructive interpretive key with which to assess his philosophical project as a whole. This first systematic study of the 'later Ricoeur' offers a critical yet sympathetic reconstruction of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of ethical life, which demonstrates his significant contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion and moral philosophy. What emerges is a clear and distinctive moral religion that binds humans together universally on the basis of the life they share as capable beings. Carter also uncovers a hitherto unforeseen thread in Ricoeur's writings concerning ethical life, pulled through his own readings of Spinoza, Aristotle, and Kant. Ricoeur's hermeneutics is structured by a Kantian architectonic informed at different levels by these three philosophers, who ground a rich, holistic, and ultimately rationalist account of ethical life and religion that resists the trappings of both positivism and postmodernism.
