A Companion to Ricoeur's Freedom and Nature

Edited by Scott Davidson - Contributions by Jean-Luc Amalric; Jakub Čapek; Scott Davidson; Natalie Depraz; Geoffrey Dierckxsens; Adam Graves; Grégori Jean; Michael Johnson; Johann Michel; Eftichis Pirovolakis; Michael Sohn and Marc-Antoine Vallée

Paul Ricoeur’s first book, Freedom and Nature, introduces many themes that resurface in various ways throughout his later work, but its significance has been mostly overlooked in the field of Ricoeur studies. Gathering together an international group of scholars, A Companion to Freedom and Nature is the first book-length study to focus exclusively on Freedom and Nature. It helps readers to understand this complex work by providing careful textual analysis of specific arguments in the book and by situating them in relation to Ricoeur’s early influences, including Merleau-Ponty, Nabert, and Ravaisson. But most importantly, this book demonstrates that Freedom and Nature remains a compelling and vital resource for readers today, precisely because it resonates with recent developments in the areas of embodied cognition, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of the will. Freedom and Nature is fundamentally a book about embodiment, and it situates the human body at the crossroads of activity and passivity, motivation and causation, the voluntary and the involuntary. This conception of the body informs Ricoeur’s unique treatment of topics such as effort, habit, and attention that are of much interest to scholars today. Together the chapters of this book provide a renewed appreciation of this important and innovative work.

Lexington Books

Pages: 256 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-7888-2 • Hardback • June 2018 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

Series: Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur

Subjects: Philosophy / Individual Philosophers, Philosophy / Movements / Phenomenology, Philosophy / Free Will & Determinism, Psychology / General, Religion / General

A Companion to Ricoeur's Freedom and Nature

Hardback

Summary

Paul Ricoeur’s first book, Freedom and Nature, introduces many themes that resurface in various ways throughout his later work, but its significance has been mostly overlooked in the field of Ricoeur studies. Gathering together an international group of scholars, A Companion to Freedom and Nature is the first book-length study to focus exclusively on Freedom and Nature. It helps readers to understand this complex work by providing careful textual analysis of specific arguments in the book and by situating them in relation to Ricoeur’s early influences, including Merleau-Ponty, Nabert, and Ravaisson. But most importantly, this book demonstrates that Freedom and Nature remains a compelling and vital resource for readers today, precisely because it resonates with recent developments in the areas of embodied cognition, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of the will. Freedom and Nature is fundamentally a book about embodiment, and it situates the human body at the crossroads of activity and passivity, motivation and causation, the voluntary and the involuntary. This conception of the body informs Ricoeur’s unique treatment of topics such as effort, habit, and attention that are of much interest to scholars today. Together the chapters of this book provide a renewed appreciation of this important and innovative work.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 256 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-7888-2 • Hardback • June 2018 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

Series: Studies in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur

Subjects: Philosophy / Individual Philosophers, Philosophy / Movements / Phenomenology, Philosophy / Free Will & Determinism, Psychology / General, Religion / General

Author

Scott Davidson is professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Rhetoric at Oklahoma City University.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction: Freedom and Nature, Then and Now
Scott Davidson

Part I: Historical Influences

1. Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty: From Perception to Action
Marc-Antoine Vallée
2. Act, Sign and Objectivity: Jean Nabert’s Influence on the Ricoeurian Phenomenology of the Will
Jean-Luc Amalric
3. Ravaisson and Ricoeur on Habit
Jakub Čapek
4. The Influence of Aquinas’s Psychology and Cosmology on Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature
Michael Sohn

Part II: Key Themes

5. The Paradox of Attention: The Action of the Self upon Itself
Michael A. Johnson
6. The Status of the Subject in Ricoeur’s Phenomenology of Decision
Johann Michel
7. Volo, ergo sum: Ricoeur Reading Maine de Biran on Effort and Resistance, the Voluntary and the Involuntary
Eftichis Pirovolakis
8. On Habit
Grégori Jean
9. The Phenomenon of Life and its Pathos
Scott Davidson

Part III: New Trajectories

10. A Descriptive Science of First-Person Experience: For an Experiential Phenomenology
Natalie Depraz
11. Ricoeur’s Take on Embodied Cognition and Imagination: Enactivism in Light of Freedom and Nature
Geoffrey Dierckxsens
12. Freedom and Resentment and Ricoeur: Towards a Normative-Narrative Theory of Agency
Adam J. Graves

Reviews

Paul Ricoeur was a prolific author. His contributions to philosophy, hermeneutical theology, literary theory, psychoanalysis, ethics, political theory, and so on, span thousands of pages. This may be why some of his earlier work—and his dense but amazingly rich dissertation Freedom and Nature in particular—has not gotten the readership it would clearly merit. Scott Davidson’s A Companion to Ricoeur’s "Freedom and Nature" aims to fill that gap and provide some instruction to lead more scholars to be more knowledgeable of Ricoeur’s crucially important early text that introduces many themes of his later work. . . . Overall, the Companion to Ricoeur’s "Freedom and Nature" is a much needed and welcome contribution that helps in understanding the richness of Ricoeur’s early thought and also its formative role for virtually all of his subsequent work.
— Philosophy in Review

Davidson’s volume turns out to be more than a companion to Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature; it is a sort of referendum on the continued relevance of Ricoeur’s thought to contemporary philosophy. For it not only provides ample resources to understand the arguments in the work, an “internal” interest for scholars of Ricoeur and hermeneutics, each essay also appeals to interests in our broader philosophical discussions. With respect to this latter “external” set of interests, moreover, its goal is not narrowly conceived, since the essays in the volume address ongoing concerns both in Continental philosophy, including discussions of embodiment, habit, life, and subjectivity, and in Anglo- American philosophy, including problems concerning intentionality, embodied-cognition, mindbody dualism, freedom of the will, and responsibility. It would be unreasonable to ask for anything more from a single volume, and the result stands as a tribute to the collective efforts on the part of all the contributors.
— Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies

With his usual, gifted editorial acumen, Scott Davidson has drawn together an impressive international group of Ricoeur scholars to help demonstrate the continuing vitality of Ricoeur’s book Freedom and Nature for the 21^st century. The present volume is to be commended for its elucidation and deepening of Ricoeur’s themes in Freedom and Nature on their own terms, in relation to Ricoeur’s subsequent corpus, and in dialogue with contemporary scholarly debates.
— George H. Taylor, Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh

This companion to one of Ricoeur’s earliest and perhaps least accessible works brings together an impressive group of commentators who ably demonstrate the originality and significance of Ricoeur's thought as it bears on traditional and current debates in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and ethics. The companion is not only a guide to an essential and often overlooked text, but it also re-interprets Ricoeur’s philosophical foundations in view of his overall project and how it bears on key convergences in today’s post-continental-analytic milieu.
— Todd Mei, Head of Philosophy, University of Kent, UK