[Interpretation&methods] Ricoeur obituary

[Ido Oren]

May 24, 2005
Paul Ricoeur, 92, Wide-Ranging French Philosopher, Is Dead
By MARGALIT FOX

Paul Ricoeur, whose work on fundamental questions about the nature of human 
existence made him one of the most eminent philosophers of the 20th 
century, died Friday at his home in Châtenay-Malabry, outside Paris. He was 92.
Dr. Ricoeur died in his sleep, Charles E. Reagan, the author of "Paul 
Ricoeur: His Life and Work" (University of Chicago, 1996), said in a 
telephone interview.

At his death, Dr. Ricoeur (pronounced rih-CURR) was the John Nuveen 
professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he 
had taught until his retirement in 1991. Among his best-known books are 
"The Rule of Metaphor" (University of Chicago, 1977) and "Memory, History, 
Forgetting" (University of Chicago, 2004). His most recent book, "The 
Course of Recognition," is scheduled to be published by Harvard University 
Press in December.

Last year, Dr. Ricoeur shared the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime 
Achievement in the Human Sciences with the religious historian Jaroslav 
Pelikan. The award, which carries a $1 million prize, is sometimes 
described as a Nobel Prize for the humanities.
Dr. Ricoeur's work concerned what he called "the phenomenon of human life," 
and ranged over an almost impossibly vast spectrum of human experience. He 
wrote on myths and symbols; language and cognition; structuralism and 
psychoanalysis; religion and aesthetics; ethics and the nature of evil; 
theories of literature and theories of law.
These diverse subjects informed his lifelong study of "philosophical 
anthropology," an exploration of the forces that underpin human action and 
human suffering.

"In the history of philosophy, he would take positions that appeared to be 
diametrically opposed, and he'd work to see if there was a middle ground," 
said Dr. Reagan, a philosopher at Kansas State University.

Dr. Ricoeur was best known for his contributions to phenomenology and 
hermeneutics. Phenomenology deals with the nature of the perception of 
reality. Hermeneutics is the art of interpreting texts. To Dr. Ricoeur, the 
two were inextricably linked. If we perceive the world in a particular way, 
he asked, how then, do we interpret those perceptions?
To move through life, Dr. Ricoeur came to believe, is to navigate a world 
of texts, each laden with meaning. Man's task is to interpret these texts. 
It is a way of organizing the world.

Good and evil deeds might be texts, for instance; so might history and 
faith, memory and narrative, word and image, language and metaphor. All are 
the products of human experience, the objects of human perception and grist 
for human interpretation. As such, Dr. Ricoeur believed, they are windows 
on the nature of human consciousness.

Jean Paul Gustave Ricoeur was born on Feb. 27, 1913, in Valence, south of 
Lyon. He was orphaned young: his mother died when he was 7 months old; his 
father, a professor of English, was killed in World War I.
After their father's death, Paul and his older sister were taken in by 
their paternal grandparents. The Ricoeurs were deeply observant 
Protestants, a conspicuous minority in Roman Catholic France, and Paul's 
early education involved rigorous Bible study and churchgoing. He went on 
to study at the University of Rennes, and later at the Sorbonne, receiving 
a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1950.

Serving in the French Army during World War II, Dr. Ricoeur was captured 
and spent five years in a German prison camp. There, he managed to continue 
his work, translating the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl into French 
in tiny handwriting in the margins of the book. The camp was a place of 
such intellectual ferment - the many French scholars there organized 
lectures, classes and even examinations - that the Vichy government 
eventually accredited it as a degree-granting institution. After the war, 
Dr. Ricoeur taught at the University of Strasbourg, and later at the 
Sorbonne and the University of Nanterre. He joined the University of 
Chicago faculty in 1971. He was a visiting professor at Yale University and 
elsewhere.

An ardent pacifist, Dr. Ricoeur was a vocal opponent of the French colonial 
enterprise in Algeria in the 1950's, and, more recently, of the war in 
Bosnia. For decades, until his death, he lived at Esprit, a socialist 
community of Christian intellectuals founded between the World Wars.

Dr. Ricoeur's wife, Simone Lejas, a childhood friend whom he married in 
1935, died before him. He is survived by three sons, Jean-Paul, Marc and 
Étienne; a daughter, Noëlle; and many grandchildren. Another son, Olivier, 
committed suicide in the mid-1980's.

Among Dr. Ricoeur's other books are "Freud and Philosophy" (Yale 
University, 1970), "Time and Narrative" (University of Chicago; 3 volumes, 
1984-88), "Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and Involuntary" (Northwestern 
University, 1966), "Fallible Man" (Regnery, 1965), "Philosophy of the Will" 
(Regnery, 1965), "Essays on Biblical Interpretation" (Fortress Press, 
1980), "History and Truth" (Northwestern University, 1965) and 
"Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences" (Cambridge University, 1981).

         Copyright 2005 ·        The New York Times Company

--
Ido Oren
Associate Professor and Associate Chair
University of Florida
Department of Political Science
234 Anderson Hall
Box 117325
Gainesville, FL 32611-7325
Tel. (352) 392-0262 ext. 252
Fax (352) 392-8127
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