Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur was the most wide-ranging French philosopher of his generation, working patiently at the intersection of phenomenology, hermeneutics, analytic philosophy, and theology. His philosophy of the will established him as a major figure in the 1950s; his later turn to narrative and time made him one of the most influential philosophers of the human sciences anywhere in the world.

In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur argued that human experience is fundamentally narrative in structure—that we understand ourselves and our actions through the stories we tell and inhabit. In Oneself as Another, he developed an account of personal identity that balanced sameness with selfhood, and obligation with capability. His willingness to engage seriously with Freud, biblical hermeneutics, and Anglo-American philosophy made him unusually ecumenical and unusually comprehensive.