Abstract

In Le volontaire et l’involontaire, Ricoeur develops an original reflection on the foundations and justification of free will. This would be unthinkable without a natural basis of necessity which is at the same time its source, its horizon and its limit. We must therefore think of the dialectical unity of the voluntary and the involuntary, but by privileging the language of the cogito. The language of objectivity, of natural causality, fails to extract itself from determinism, although it offers the phenomenologist a useful counterpoint to his approach. Ricoeur thus adopts a form of compatibilism making it possible to preserve a strong sense of free will in coherence with a natural necessity without rupture.