The Just

“The novelties of this book are the analyses of different phases of judicial practice: hearing, judging, sanction, rehabilitation and pardon.  It is fascinating to read how Ricoeur analyses these with his hermeneutics of detours or hermeneutics of distanciation, attempting to do justice to both interpretation and argumentation, both punishment and pardon, and so on.”

“The essays assembled in <I>The Just<I> are at once essential readings for anyone concerned with the link between ethics, law, and politics and perfect complements to the seventh, eighth, and ninth studies contained in <I>Oneself as Another<I>. However, knowledge of Ricoeur’s earlier writings is not a prerequisite for understanding the content of these essays since he retains the style of a moderator by engaging the most powerful authors on justice available: Aristotle, Kant, Arendt, Rawls, Walzer, to name a few.”

“In essays on Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Ronald Dworkin, among American philosophers and Hannah Arendt and Luc Botanski among European theorists, Ricoeur sketches a distinctive position on questions of justice that straddles the liberal/communitarian divide common in the Anglo-American world. . . . [Ricoeur provides] a fresh perspective on current debates within his own interesting account of the structure of moral action.”--Georgia Warnke, <I>Ethics<I>

“In these essays, Ricoeur applies his hermeneutical theory of the capable person, articulated in the magisterial <I>Oneself as Another<I>, to the philosophy of law and justice, demonstrating once again the remarkable breadth of his research project.”