JUSTICE IN PAUL RICOEUR’S PHILOSOPHY Pagorn Singsuriya Mahidol University, Thailand Abstract According to Paul Ricoeur, the question “What is the just?” is interrelated with the question “Why be just?” which is in turn connected to “Who am I?” Ricoeur elaborates his conception of justice on the basis of his “little ethics,” which is founded on his conception of narrative identity. According to him, justice is basically rooted in the dialectic tension between alterity and identity, which constitutes the self. His analysis of selfhood, from the most elementary level in semantic analysis onwards, shows that features of justice are reflected in the ontological-existential structure. It can be said that these features as a whole are characteristic of human existence, which is prone to perversion by evil. His analysis of the narrative provide the framework for a further analysis of the just in political, juridical and criminological fields. Background In Thailand, the study of justice or its counterpart, i.e. engagement against domination, largely draws upon the liberalist-socialist debate in the analytic tradition on the one hand, and upon Michael Foucault, the prophet of extremity of continental philosophy, on the other. This research fills in the gap with the study of justice according to Paul Ricoeur, one of the contemporary philosopher giants, who confesses the obsession in mediating polemics. According to Ricoeur, the just finds its locus at the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical axes, i.e., consecutively, the dialogical constitution of the self and the hierarchical constitution of the moral qualifier predicates. The orthogonal figure is rooted in his philosophical anthropology that dialectically fabricates subjectivity with the themes of identity-alterity, and sameness-selfhood. Since the just is at the heart of the