ABSTRACT
One of the most abiding concerns of Ricoeur's later philosophy was undoubtedly the question of narrative. Ricoeur's critical hermeneutics offers four central tasks of narrative: to realize our debt to the historical past; to respect the rival claims of memory and forgetfulness; to cultivate a notion of self-identity; and to persuade and evaluate action. All four, as Ricoeur suggests, lead ultimately to a decisive hermeneutic threshold where a poetics of narrative converses with an ethics of responsibility. Historical communities, Ricoeur repeatedly shows, are constituted in great part by the stories they recount to themselves and to others. Hence the importance of the rectifications that contemporary historians bring to bear on the historical accounts of their predecessors. The narrative model of self-identity has been developed by a number of contemporary thinkers, from Ricoeur and Maclntyre to Taylor and Benhabib.
