Description: Traces the decentered formulation of self at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy from his earliest works to his most recent.
Brief description: Henry Isaac Venema is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Messiah College.
Review Quotes:
"Venema has taken on a significant project in that he attempts to show that there are specific strands of thought that underlie and unify Ricoeur's thinking on phenomenological description, interpretation, understanding, narrative, metaphor, imagination, and selfhood. Helping others understand these textual and thematic interconnections in Ricoeur's writings is a significant contribution to the study of Ricoeur's thought and place in twentieth-century philosophy vis-à-vis Ricoeur's own responses to other major twentieth-century thinkers. 'Selfhood' takes Ricoeur back to some of the very fundamental issues in Husserlian phenomenology that contributed to Ricoeur's philosophical development and points to those issues where Ricoeur distanced himself from specific phenomenological formulations." -- Gayle L. Ormiston, coeditor of The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur
"This book exhibits a good grasp of certain main phases of the development of Ricoeur's thought and thus is not merely a regurgitation of Ricoeur, but quite a creative rendition, and from a questioning point of view. It carries Ricoeur scholarship and interests into discussions that are relevant to continental philosophy today." -- Patrick L. Bourgeois, coauthor of Traces of Understanding: A Profile of Heidegger's and Ricoeur's Hermeneutics