Ricoeur
Contemporary philosophyThis thinker was interested in hermeneutics, phenomenology and analytic philosophy, as well as in the notions of will, memory, and narrative.
He led a brilliant academic career, from the Sorbonne to Nanterre, then from Louvain to Chicago.
Bibliography
Here are the essential books if you want to better understand this author's thought:
Karl Simms, 2002. Paul Ricœur, Routledge Critical Thinkers. New York: Routledge.
Boyd Blundell, 2010. Paul Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy: Detour and Return. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Francis J. Mootz III and George H. Taylor (eds.), 2011. Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutic. Continuum
John Wall, 2005 Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility". New York: Oxford University Press.
Bernard P. Dauenhauer, 1998. Paul Ricœur: The Promise and Risk of Politics. Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Biography: life of Ricoeur
Youth
Paul Ricoeur was born in Valence in the Drôme in 1913, but quickly became an orphan at the age of two.
He was educated at the Lycée Emile Zola in Rennes, and went on to excel in his philosophy studies, finishing in second place in the agrégation in 1935.
During the war, he was taken prisoner, and it was while in captivity that he translated Husserl's Ideen, to which he had been introduced by Gabriel Marcel.
Maturity
Once free, he devoted himself to his thesis, focusing on the notion of the will, while teaching at a lycée in the Cévennes. He was then appointed to Strasbourg, then to the Sorbonne in 1956. Of Protestant persuasion, he also taught at the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris.
Appointed to the philosophy department at Nanterre in 1964, he was elected dean of what would become the University of Nanterre. Taken to task during the events of 1968, he resigned and joined the Husserl archives at the Catholic University of Louvain.
Invited by the University of Chicago, he joined the philosophy department and traveled frequently between the two countries
End of life
A prolific thinker, Ricoeur continued publishing works until his death in 2005 in Châtenay-Malabry.
Main works
Oneself as Another
Memory, History, Forgetting
Time and Narrative
Fallible Man: Philosophy of the Will
Interpretation Theory
The Conflict of Interpretations