Paul Ricoeur Quotes on Knowledge

Paul Ricoeur's project — across Freud and Philosophy (1965), The Conflict of Interpretations (1969), the three-volume Time and Narrative (1983–85), and Oneself as Another (1990) — develops a hermeneutics of suspicion alongside a hermeneutics of restoration, integrating phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, analytic philosophy of action, and biblical hermeneutics into a single sustained inquiry. The principal thesis is that human self-understanding is always mediated by signs, symbols, and texts — there is no immediate self-presence of the kind Husserlian phenomenology attempted to recover — and so the proper philosophical method must work through the long detour of interpretation that the cultural inheritance supplies. The framework defined the late-twentieth-century French hermeneutic tradition and shaped subsequent work in narrative theory, ethics, and philosophy of religion.