Ricoeur waited until the 1980s to publish a series of essays on his overriding project, an ontology of action. This edition of the 1991 translation contains the essence of that project, from Ricoeur's earlier thought on the phenomenology of will to his later hermeneutics of praxis. Passing in turn from his synthesis of Husserl and Schleiermacher to beyond Heidegger's hermeneutics of text-in-action, Ricoeur takes a dynamic approach as he evaluates hermeneutical phenomenology, including the function of distanciation within it and the influence of philosophical and biblical hermeneutics, the transition from the hermeneutics of texts to that of action, in which Ricoeur finds meaningful action considered as a text, and the applications of these hermeneutics into ideology and politics, with an emphasis on utopianism. This is a worthy companion to Ricoeur's The Conflict of Interpretations. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)