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Thinkers

Paul Ricoeur

Phenomenological · Europe · 1913 to 2005

French thinker who held that we understand ourselves by interpreting symbols and the stories we tell about our lives.

What it is

Paul Ricoeur (1913 to 2005) was a French philosopher, born in Valence, who is best known for joining phenomenology, the description of lived experience, to hermeneutics, the interpretation of meaning. He was orphaned young and raised in the French Reformed Protestant tradition. He wrote more than thirty books, and in 2000 he received the Kyoto Prize.

He taught at the University of Strasbourg from 1948 to 1956 and received a State doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1950. His work moved from a philosophy of the will to studies of interpretation, language, metaphor, narrative and memory. A square in Paris was named after him on the hundredth anniversary of his birth.

The main ideas

  • The will and evil. He began with a philosophy of the will, describing what it is to choose and act, and he meant to ask how evil enters human choice, something that description alone cannot explain.
  • Interpretation as an arc. To interpret is to move from a first understanding through study to a wider understanding, which changes both the interpreter and the world they can imagine living in.
  • Live metaphor. A fresh metaphor says more than one thing at once. It works through a whole sentence, not by swapping a single word for another, and it creates meaning.
  • Narrative identity. We understand who someone is through the story told about their life, by the person or by others, and personal identity can be seen in terms of such a story.
  • Memory and forgetting. He asked about the uses and abuses of memory in public life, including blocked, manipulated and obliging memory.
  • Phenomenology with hermeneutics. He widened phenomenology to include the study of texts, symbols and action, and not only of consciousness.

What it looks like in practice

Think of a time when you told the story of a hard year in your life and, in the telling, saw a pattern you had not noticed. Ricoeur would say that the story is not merely a report of the self, but part of how the self is formed, and that someone else telling it would make you a somewhat different person. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The Rule of Metaphor is his study of metaphor and meaning.
  • Time and Narrative (three volumes, 1984 to 1988) is his study of time and the telling of stories.
  • Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) is his last big book, on memory and its uses and abuses.
  • Living Up to Death (2009) collects fragments published after he died.

Questions and criticism

  • A wide field. He wrote on so many subjects that it is hard to say what holds his work together, though several threads run through it.
  • Is a life a story? If personal identity depends on narrative, it is fair to ask what to make of a life that cannot be told as a story.
  • Who tells it? If others also tell the story of a person, it is fair to ask whose version counts.

Close neighbours

Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer belong to the same tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Edmund Husserl · He began as a translator and interpreter of Husserl's phenomenology.
  • Hans-Georg Gadamer · He built his own account of interpretation alongside and in reply to Gadamer.

Other Phenomenological thinkers

Sources we used

  • Paul Ricoeur · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
  • Paul Ricœur · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026
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