Ricoeur Paul (b.1913), French hermeneuticist and phenomenologist who has been a professor at several French universities as well as the University of Naples, Yale University, and the University of Chicago. He has received major prizes from France, Germany, and Italy. He is the author of twenty-some volumes translated in a variety of languages. Among his best-known books are Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary; Freud and Philosophy: An Essay of Interpretation; The Conflict of Interpretations: Essay in Hermeneutics; The Role of the Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, Time and Narrative; and Oneself as Another. His early studies with the French existentialist Marcel resulted in a book-length study of Marcel’s work and later a series of published dialogues with him. Ricoeur’s philosophical enterprise is colored by a continuing tension between faith and reason. His long-standing commitments to both the significance of the individual and the Christian faith are reflected in his hermeneutical voyage, his commitment to the Esprit movement, and his interest in the writings of Emmanuel Mounier. This latter point is also seen in his claim of the inseparability of action and discourse in our quest for meaning. In our comprehension of both history and fiction one must turn to the text to understand its plot as guideline if we are to comprehend experience of any reflective sort. In the end there are no metaphysical or epistemological grounds by which meaning can be verified, and yet our nature is such that possibility must be present before us. Ricoeur attempts his explanation through a hermeneutic phenomenology. The very hermeneutics of existence that follows is itself limited by reason’s questioning of experience and its attempts to transcend the limit through the language of symbols and metaphors. Freedom and meaning come to be realized in the actualization of an ethics that arises out of the very act of existing and thus transcends the mere natural voluntary distinction of a formal ethic. It is clear from his later work that he rejects any form of foundationalism including phenomenology as well as nihilism and easy skepticism. Through a sort of interdependent dialectic that goes beyond the more mechanical models of Hegelianism or Marxism, the self understands itself and is understood by the other in terms of its suffering and its moral actions.
See also HEGEL, HERMENEUTICS , HUSSERL , MARCEL , PHENOMENOLOGY. J.Bi.