Paul Ricoeur Quotes on Time
Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume Time and Narrative (Temps et récit, 1983–85) gives twentieth-century continental philosophy its most sustained treatment of the relation between phenomenological time and the time of history and fiction. The central argument is that human time — neither the cosmological time of physics nor the pure phenomenological time of Augustine and Husserl — is constituted in the narrative configuration through which the apparent paradoxes of time are productively resolved into the meaningful temporal wholes that historical and fictional narratives display. The framework integrates with Ricoeur’s broader hermeneutic phenomenology (Freud and Philosophy, The Rule of Metaphor, Oneself as Another) and shaped the subsequent narrative turn in moral psychology, theology, and the philosophy of history.
Quotes
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Attributed to Paul Ricoeur:
“To narrate is already to explain.”
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Attributed to Paul Ricoeur:
“Memory is the future of the past.”
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“I dislike those who present myself as a Protestant philosopher; I am a philosopher and a Protestant.”
Je suis irrité lorsqu’on me présente comme philosophe protestant, je suis philosophe et protestant. Paul Ricœur : "Je ne suis pas un philosophe protestant" (January 13, 2016) -
“The possibility of noncongruence, of discrepancy, in many ways already presupposes that individuals as well as collective entities are related to their own lives and to social reality not only in the mode of participation without distance but precisely in the mode of noncongruence. ... The presupposition here is precisely that of a social imagination, operating in both constructive and destructive ways, as both confirmation and contestation of the present situation.”
p. 3