Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur was orphaned and captured by the Nazis during WWII. He nevertheless managed to translate Edmund Husserl’s philosophy while a prisoner of war and made an enduring impact on the “Continental” tradition of philosophy, religion, and the humanities generally. The core of his philosophical view was that it is mediation that gives us access to objects, by perception for example, or any category of thought. We can, moreover, compare these mediating devices to discern which are better and in the broadest sense this is what he meant by philosophical hermeneutics. Since the idea is quite general, he wrote on mediating symbols, metaphors, texts, translations and narratives as ways that huma...View all