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Paul Ricoeur

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born

February 27, 1913 in Valence, Drôme, France

died

May 20, 2005

genre

Philosophy, Social Sciences, Politics

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Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. His books include a multi-volume project on the philosophy of the will: Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950, Eng. tr. 1966), Fallible Man (1960, Eng. tr. 1967), and The Symbolism of Evil (1960, Eng. tr. 1970); a major study of Freud: Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965, Eng. tr. 1970); The Rule of Metaphor (1975, Eng. tr. 1977); Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976); the three-volume Time and Narrative (1983-85, Eng. tr. 1984–88); Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986); the published v...more Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. His books include a multi-volume project on the philosophy of the will: Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950, Eng. tr. 1966), Fallible Man (1960, Eng. tr. 1967), and The Symbolism of Evil (1960, Eng. tr. 1970); a major study of Freud: Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965, Eng. tr. 1970); The Rule of Metaphor (1975, Eng. tr. 1977); Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976); the three-volume Time and Narrative (1983-85, Eng. tr. 1984–88); Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986); the published version of his Gifford lectures: Oneself as Another (1990, Eng. tr. 1992); Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, Eng. tr. 2004); and The Course of Recognition (2004, Eng. tr. 2005). In addition to his books, Ricoeur published more than 500 essays, many of which appear in collections in English: History and Truth (1955, Eng. tr. 1965); Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (1967); The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1969, Eng. tr. 1974); Political and Social Essays (1974); Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980); Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981); From Text to Action (1986, Eng. tr. 1991); Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (1995); The Just (1995, Eng. tr. 2000); On Translation (2004, Eng. tr. 2004); and Reflections on the Just (2001, Eng. tr. 2007).

The major theme that unites his writings is that of a philosophical anthropology. This anthropology, which Ricoeur came to call an anthropology of the “capable human being,” aims to give an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives. Though the accent is always on the possibility of understanding the self as an agent responsible for its actions, Ricoeur consistently rejects any claim that the self is immediately transparent to itself or fully master of itself. Self-knowledge only comes through our relation to the world and our life with and among others in that world.

In the course of developing his anthropology, Ricoeur made a major methodological shift. His writings prior to 1960 were in the tradition of existential phenomenology. But during the 1960s Ricoeur concluded that properly to study human reality he had to combine phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. For this hermeneutic phenomenology, whatever is intelligible is accessible to us in and through language and all deployments of language call for interpretation. Accordingly, “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms” (Oneself as Another, 15, translation corrected). This hermeneutic or linguistic turn did not require him to disavow the basic results of his earlier investigations. It did, however, lead him not only to revisit them but also to see more clearly their implications.(less)

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Books by Paul Ricoeur

Average rating: 3.94 · 815 ratings · 72 reviews · 84 distinct works

	Time and Narrative, Volume 1 by Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen McLaughlin (Translator), David Pellauer (Translator) 3.97 avg rating — 108 ratings — published 1983 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Oneself as Another by Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen Blamey (Translator) 4.00 avg rating — 65 ratings — published 1992 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Memory, History, Forgetting by Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen Blamey (Translator), David Pellauer (Translator) 3.93 avg rating — 60 ratings — 8 editions	My rating:
	The Symbolism of Evil by Paul Ricoeur, Emerson Buchanan (translator) 3.91 avg rating — 55 ratings — published 1960 — 3 editions	My rating:
	The Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricoeur, Robert Czerny (Translator), Kathleen McLaughlin (Translator) 3.95 avg rating — 61 ratings — 10 editions	My rating:
	The Conflict of Interpretations by Paul Ricoeur, Editions De Seuil (Text), Don Ihde (Introduction) 4.22 avg rating — 40 ratings — published 1969 — 7 editions	My rating:
	Hermeneutics & the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action & Interpretation by Paul Ricoeur, John B. Thompson (Editor) 4.28 avg rating — 36 ratings — published 1981 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning by Paul Ricoeur, Ted Klein (Preface) 3.67 avg rating — 36 ratings — 3 editions	My rating:
	Time and Narrative, Volume 3 by Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen Blamey (Translator), David Pellauer (Translator) 4.13 avg rating — 30 ratings — published 1985 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative & Imagination by Paul Ricoeur, Mark I. Wallace (Editor) 4.15 avg rating — 26 ratings — published 1995 — 3 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Paul Ricoeur

“I find myself only by losing myself.”
― Paul Ricoeur

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“The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.”
― Paul Ricoeur

tags: philosophy

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“But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence. Hence to demythologize is to interpret myth, that is, to relate the objective representations of the myth to the self-understanding which is both shown and concealed in it.”
― Paul Ricoeur