Passion for the Possible

Paul Ricoeur's entire philosophical project narrates a "passion for the possible" expressed in the hope that in spite of death, closure, and sedimentation, life is opened by superabundance, by how the world gives us much more than is possible. Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology is a phenomenology of human capacity, which gives onto the groundless ground of human being, namely, God. Thus the story of the capable man, beginning with original goodness held captive by a servile will and ending with the possibility of liberation and regeneration of the heart, underpins his passion for the more than possible.
The essays in this volume trace the fluid movement between phenomenological and religious descriptions of the capable self that emerges across Ricoeur's oeuvre and establish points of connection for future developments that might draw inspiration from this body of thought.

Brian Treanor is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Environmental Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Aspects of Alterity (Fordham, 2006) and Emplotting Virtue (SUNY Press, 2014), and the coeditor of A Passion for the Possible (Fordham University Press, 2010), Interpreting Nature (Fordham University Press, 2013), and Being-in-Creation (Fordham University Press, 2015). Current projects include the development of an “earthy” hermeneutics, and a monograph on the experience of joy.
Henry Venema is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brandon University, in Canada. He is the author of Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur.