Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur was born at Valence in southern France; his mother died months after his birth and his father was killed at the Marne in 1915, and as a 'ward of the nation' he was raised by grandparents and an aunt in Rennes in a strict Protestant household. He studied philosophy at Rennes and the Sorbonne under the influence of Marcel and Jaspers, passed the agrégation in 1935, was called up in 1939 and captured in 1940, and spent five years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Pomerania, where he read Husserl, Jaspers and Heidegger and translated the first volume of Ideas.

After the war he taught at Strasbourg and from 1956 at the Sorbonne. The first volume of his Philosophy of the Will, The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950), described phenomenologically the relations of will and body, decision and necessity. The Symbolism of Evil (1960) turned to hermeneutics: the experience of evil can be approached only through symbols of stain, sin and guilt, and 'the symbol gives rise to thought'. Freud and Philosophy (1965) distinguished two hermeneutics: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud are 'masters of suspicion' who unmask the illusions of consciousness, while the phenomenology of religion seeks to recover meaning; both are necessary.

In 1966 he moved to the new University of Nanterre, was elected dean in 1969 and tried to talk with the students; in 1970 a student put a dustbin over his head, police entered the campus, and he resigned. For more than a decade he then taught each year at the University of Chicago, long neglected in France, and in America he encountered analytic philosophy and narrative theory. The Rule of Metaphor (1975) argued that metaphor is not ornament but the creation of new meaning through semantic clash; the three volumes of Time and Narrative (1983–5) held that human time becomes intelligible only through narrative, that history and fiction interweave in it, and that personal identity is 'narrative identity'.

Oneself as Another (1990) summed up his ethics: the self is neither Descartes' cogito nor Nietzsche's fragments but is constituted by promise, narrative and responsibility to others, and the good life is 'with and for others in just institutions'. Memory, History, Forgetting (2000) addressed the traumatic memory of the twentieth century and closed with a meditation on forgiveness. A Protestant, a socialist and a cosmopolitan, friend of Levinas, Gadamer and Habermas alike, he received the Kyoto Prize in old age and died quietly at home at ninety-two.