THE SELF IN THE WORLD: The Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur’s work on phenomenology proposes a self in the world, in a world that is acted upon by, and acting upon, the self. This chapter outlines some of the major movements Ricoeur made during his long and prolific academic career. His method was to create dialogue between two juxtaposed positions and explore how, together, they offer more than their separate parts. The particular and the general, as well as the abstract and the concrete, became the planes upon which Ricoeur positions the self in relation to the other, through language and narrative, in time. This chapter’s aim is to articulate Ricoeur’s way of understanding experience in the light of his varied approaches to the self.