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The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Volume 22
Paul Ricoeur is widely regarded as the foremost living phenomenologist. His writings cover a wide range of topics, from the history of philosophy, literary criticism and aesthetics, to metaphysics, ethics, religion, semiotics, linguistic structuralism, the humanistic sciences, psychoanalysis, Marxism, guilt and evil, and conflicts of interpretation. In similar format to the preceding 21 volumes of the "Library of Living Philosophers", this book contains Ricoeur's intellectual autobiography, critical essays by 25 leading philosophers, and Ricoeur's replies to these criticisms.
- GenresPhilosophy
846 pages, Paperback
First published December 30, 1994
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About the author
Paul Ricœur
310 books456 followersPaul 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 24, 2025
A rare earnest review (more about the man than this text):
I've always read Ricoeur as a "Gabriel Marcel 2.0 with Protestant DLC" and, to use Ricoeur's own phrase, a "long way to hermeneutics". (Contrast and use Heidegger and Gadamer's shared "short way" if you prefer Germanic, clean cut methods at the expense of nuance and embarrassing beholdenness to Hölderlin; call a doctor if erection and/or fondness for Hannah Arendt lasts after four hours.) This read of him has not changed, but I better grasp why he was what he was and what he did.
Ricoeur's "long way", however annoying, is intellectually honest: to get at the problem of understanding, we must, sadly, explore everything. Many unbathed, problematically nuanced Twitterati claim to be "polymaths", but Ricoeur is a rare example of someone who came close to it (he never claimed it, and it is now impossible; the polymath died with Leibniz). Want to understand texts? Understand a symbol. Want to understand a symbol? Understand the tradition in which it functions. Bonus points for considering your own psychology (pace Freud) for doing such work. Und so weiter.
Ricoeur, bluntly, wrote too much to be read; the oeuvre is not of even value. This text is an attempt to address the bloat. Moreover, he had an ingrown toenail of literary bias in assessment of all, but not so severe that he couldn't walk.
This text gives a good take of the spread, although marked by some of the 20th c. bias to make hermeneuts deconstructionists; he was no such thing. If you want 800 pages of exegesis of a man devoted to exegesis, go for it. The good outweighs the poor and bad; take the long way. The book is also big enough to kill a fly, if not a weak monk.
I've always read Ricoeur as a "Gabriel Marcel 2.0 with Protestant DLC" and, to use Ricoeur's own phrase, a "long way to hermeneutics". (Contrast and use Heidegger and Gadamer's shared "short way" if you prefer Germanic, clean cut methods at the expense of nuance and embarrassing beholdenness to Hölderlin; call a doctor if erection and/or fondness for Hannah Arendt lasts after four hours.) This read of him has not changed, but I better grasp why he was what he was and what he did.
Ricoeur's "long way", however annoying, is intellectually honest: to get at the problem of understanding, we must, sadly, explore everything. Many unbathed, problematically nuanced Twitterati claim to be "polymaths", but Ricoeur is a rare example of someone who came close to it (he never claimed it, and it is now impossible; the polymath died with Leibniz). Want to understand texts? Understand a symbol. Want to understand a symbol? Understand the tradition in which it functions. Bonus points for considering your own psychology (pace Freud) for doing such work. Und so weiter.
Ricoeur, bluntly, wrote too much to be read; the oeuvre is not of even value. This text is an attempt to address the bloat. Moreover, he had an ingrown toenail of literary bias in assessment of all, but not so severe that he couldn't walk.
This text gives a good take of the spread, although marked by some of the 20th c. bias to make hermeneuts deconstructionists; he was no such thing. If you want 800 pages of exegesis of a man devoted to exegesis, go for it. The good outweighs the poor and bad; take the long way. The book is also big enough to kill a fly, if not a weak monk.
Displaying 1 of 1 review