Abstract

Paul Ricoeur is one of the most significant hermeneutic thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Valence, France, in 1931, he taught as professor of philosophy at the universities of Strasbourg, Paris, and Chicago, and also served as director for the Center of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics in Paris. Together with heidegger (Article 18) and gadamer (Article 38), Ricoeur developed a philosophy based on the view that existence is itself a mode of interpretation (hermeneia). Or, as the hermeneutic maxim goes: Life interprets itself. But where Heidegger concentrated directly on a fundamental ontology of interpretation, Ricoeur advances what he calls the “long route” of multiple hermeneutic detours. This brought him into dialogue with the human sciences, where philosophy discovers its limits in what is outside of philosophy, in those border exchanges where meaning traverses the various signs and disciplines in which being is interpreted by human understanding. He challenged Heidegger's view that being is accessible through the “short route” of existence understanding itself through its ownmost possibilities, maintaining instead that it is always mediated through an endless process of interpretations – cultural, religious, political, historical, and scientific. Hence Ricoeur's basic definition of hermeneutics as the “art of deciphering indirect meaning.” A definition he explains as follows.