Ricœur, Paul (1913—2005)
French religious philosopher and hermeneuticist. Born in Valence, Ricœur was orphaned at two (his father was killed in World War I at the Battle of the Marne and his mother died shortly after his birth), and raised by his devoutly Protestant paternal grandparents in Rennes. He completed his preliminary training at the University of Rennes, having failed the entrance exam to the illustrious École Normale Supérieure. Graduating in 1935, Ricœur moved to Paris to undertake doctoral work at the Sorbonne. There, he participated in weekly study sessions at the home of Gabriel Marcel, who introduced him to existentialism philosophy and theology. He also collaborated with Emmanuel Mounier, founder of the left-wing Christian journal Esprit. The irruption of World War II interrupted his studies. Ricœur was drafted into the infantry in 1939 and flung into the fray almost immediately. His unit was captured by the invading German army in 1940 and he spent the remainder of the war in a prison camp. It was not especially arduous in the camp, it gave him time to read and think and there were a number of other intellectuals there with whom he could converse (indeed the camp was accredited as a degree-granting body by the Vichy government). He also began his translation of Husserl, Edmund’s Ideen 1 (Ideas 1) there, which he would subsequently submit as his minor thesis. He also collaborated with Mikel Dufrenne on a study of the German existentialist Jaspers, Karl, which was published after the war as Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence (Karl Jaspers and the philosophy of existence, 1947). After the war Ricœur taught at the Collège Cévenol until 1948 when he succeeded Jean Hyppolite as Chair in the History of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. In 1950 he submitted his major thesis, Philosophie de la volonté: Le Volontaire et l’involuntaire (The Philosophy of the Will: The Voluntary and Involuntary), which would prove to be the first part of a trilogy. In 1956 he moved to the Sorbonne, where he remained for a decade before taking up a senior administrative position in the newly established and so-called experimental university at Nanterre (among its faculty members were Badiou, Alain, Deleuze, Gilles, and Foucault, Michel), but this experience proved a disappointment. He was assaulted by students during the events of May ’68 and derided by them for being out of touch. This was in complete contrast to his experience in the 1950s when as an outspoken critic of France’s war in Algeria, his students had saved him from internment. Disenchanted with French academic life, Ricœur left France, first for Belgium and then definitively to the University of Chicago in the US. Ricœur is best known for his critique of Freud, De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud (1965), translated as Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970), his study of metaphor, La métaphore vive (1975), translated as The Rule of Metaphor (1977), and the immense three-volume work on narrative, Temps et Récit (1983—85), translated as Time and Narrative (1984—88). Always acknowledged as important, Ricœur’s work has never enjoyed fashionability, but in a way that is precisely what is important about it: he was never taken in completely by fashionable ways of thinking such as existentialism or structuralism and his work always offered a powerful alternative viewpoint. Further Reading: F. Dosse Paul Ricœur: Les Sens d’une Vie (1997). D. Kaplan Ricœur’s Critical Theory (2003). R. Kearney On Paul Ricœur: The Owl of Minerva (2004). K. Simms Paul Ricœur (2002).