ABSTRACT
There was, however, a time — as long ago as the early 1980s when the author was acting as; supervisor of her doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur — when she read and discussed with her virtually everything that she was then writing. Vulnerability was, then, a condition that Pamela knew only too well as an inescapable feature of her own experience of herself. It is obviously true of all writers, philosophers included, that certain themes will preoccupy them all others at certain periods of their lives, and even in many cases throughout the whole of their working and thinking careers. One of the most poignant passages in Pamela’s writings runs as follows: “Any con-tinuous relation to the other can be destroyedby death. Pamela herself was shockingly still much too young to die as early in her life as that.
