Ricoeur
Contemporary philosophyThis thinker engaged with hermeneutics, phenomenology and analytic philosophy, as well as with the notions of will, memory and narrative.
He enjoyed a distinguished academic career, from the Sorbonne to Nanterre, and from Louvain to Chicago.
On this page dedicated to Ricoeur, discover a bibliography, videos, a detailed biography, and a list of his major works.
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.
Recommended Videos
Interviews, lectures, radio programmes... here are 10 videos that will help you better understand Ricoeur's thought.
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Biography: Life of Ricoeur
Youth
Paul Ricoeur was born in Valence, in the Drôme, in 1913, and was orphaned at the age of two.
He was educated at the Lycée Émile Zola in Rennes and went on to excel in philosophy, finishing second in the agrégation in 1935.
During the war, he was taken prisoner, and it was in captivity that he translated Husserl's Ideen, a work to which he had been introduced by Gabriel Marcel.
Maturity
Once free, he devoted himself to his doctoral thesis on the notion of the will, while teaching at a lycée in the Cévennes. He was subsequently appointed to Strasbourg, then to the Sorbonne in 1956. A Protestant by conviction, 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 Paris X-Nanterre. During the events of 1968 he came under fierce criticism and resigned, going on to join the Husserl Archives at the Catholic University of Louvain.
Invited to join the philosophy department at the University of Chicago, he travelled frequently between the two countries.
Later Life
A prolific thinker, Ricoeur continued to publish 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