ABSTRACT
Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) was a French philosopher who made significant contributions in the fields of phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, social philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of religion and biblical hermeneutics. His engagement with specific philosophers is widespread and includes not just his European contemporaries and classical figures in the history of philosophy, but also philosophers within the analytic tradition, such as Donald Davidson, Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit. His life during World War II was spent mainly in captivity as a French army officer in a German prisoner of war camp. During this period, he famously translated into French for the first time, Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I. After the years of student protests in the 1960s in France and an unfortunate failed attempt to run a new university at Nanterre based on some of the ideals driving the student call for change, Ricoeur moved to the United States to assume the John Nuveen chair at the University of Chicago Divinity School, previously held by Paul Tillich. In the 1980s, he returned to Paris, where he pursued with vigour studies on legal and distributive justice and was even summoned as an expert witness (as a philosopher!) to comment on a case involving HIV-contaminated blood (Ricoeur 2007b, 249–256).
