PAUL RICOEUR

Paul Ricoeur was born in 1913 in Valence,

France. He studied philosophy first at the
University of Rennes and then at the Sorbonne.
From the earliest years of his academic life he
was convinced that there is a basic, irreducible
difference between persons and things. Unlike
things, persons can engage in free and
thoughtful action.
Ricoeur's flagship in
this endeavor is his
Narrative Theory.
 He was also a leading exponent of
hermeneutical philosophy. He
developed a theory of metaphor and
discourse as well as articulating a
comprehensive vision of the relation of
time, history, and narrative.
 He has this reflective
philosophy which concerns
about
 has to do not just
with the identity of the characters in a story
or history, but with the larger claim.
1. What story does a person tell about
his or her life?
2. What story do others tell about it?
Ricoeur proposed a
hermeunetic idea of
 ….the self does not know itself
immediately, but only indirectly by the
detour of the cultural signs of all sorts which
are articulated on the symbolic mediations
which always already articulates actions,
and, among them, the narratives of
everyday life.
 means more than simply a
story. Narrative refers to the way that
humans experience time in terms of the way
we understand our future potentialities, as
well as the way we mentally organize our
sense of the past.
 More specifically, the past, for Ricoeur,
demands narrativisation. Humans tend to
carry out the disparate past events into a
meaningful whole to establish a causal and
meaningful connections between them.
 Time and Narrative
Paul Ricoeur points out that we experience
time in two different ways. We experience
time as linear succession when we
experience the passing hours and days
and the progression of our lives from birth
to death.
 Time and Narrative
The other is phenomenological time.
This is the time experienced in terms of
the past, present and future.
 Time and Narrative
As self-aware embodied beings, we not
only experience time as linear succession
but we are also oriented to the succession
of time in terms of what has been, what is
and what will be.
 Time and Narrative
Ricoeur’s concept of “human time” is
expressive of a complex experience in
which phenomenological time and
cosmological time are integrated.
 The “narrative” constructs the
identity of the character, what
can be called his or her
narrative identity. In constructing
that of the story told. It is the
identity of the story that makes
the identity of the character.