Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005)

1. Early work

Born in Valence in 1913, Ricoeur began his philosophical career at a time when phenomenology and existentialism were influential in French intellectual circles. As a student in Paris in the late 1930s, and subsequently as a prisoner of war in Germany during the Second World War, Ricoeur read the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers and Marcel. Following the war, Ricoeur and Mikel Dufrenne published a lengthy study of Jaspers, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence (1947); in the same year, Ricoeur published his own comparative study of Jaspers and Marcel. Ricoeur also translated Husserl’s Ideen I into French, thereby establishing himself as a leading authority on phenomenology (see Phenomenological movement).

In 1948 Ricoeur was elected to a chair in the history of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. During the following decade Ricoeur sought to develop an ambitious project on the ‘philosophy of the will’: that is, a systematic reflection on the affective and volitional aspects of human existence. In the first volume of this project, Freedom and Nature (1950), Ricoeur employed a phenomenological method to explore the interplay between the voluntary and the involuntary features of life, such as the way in which action is mediated by the organs of the body and by a range of factors which lie beyond the individual’s control. The second volume of the philosophy of the will was published in 1960 as two separate books: Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil. In these books Ricoeur moved away from a strict phenomenological method and began to develop a more interpretative approach to symbols and myths, as a way of gaining access to problems of human fallibility and fault. Ricoeur sketched the plan for a third volume which would be concerned with the ‘poetics of the will’, but postponed this project while he turned his attention to other matters.