Abstract

Paul Ricoeur's reflective career, though having taken a number of detours, has remained surprisingly consistent with regard to fundamental intentions. It has been the purpose of this study to patiently follow the web of these intentions from Ricoeur's earliest major works devoted to philosophical anthropology to his most recent reflections concerned with language. ;Ricoeur's early attachment to phenomenology as a suitable method for working out a philosophical anthropology is explored with the intention of disclosing Ricoeur's equally exacting concerns for outlining the major features of an ontology. That the earliest works should point beyond themselves to a projected poetics of the will is instructive for a study that would uncover the fruits of Ricoeur's reflective labor in search of a developed ontology. ;Ontology demands a philosophical anthropology just as any philosophical anthropology must bear witness to its proper unfolding within the scope of an ontology that would speak to questions concerning reality, truth, and transcendence. ;Having noted the early methodological determinations in the philosophy of the will in chapter one, the study moves to Ricoeur's employment of methodological procedures that aid the disclosure of a conception of human fragility and fallibility. The introduction of Ricoeur's work on Freud serves to highlight the emerging importance of hermeneutics which Ricoeur would graft onto phenomenology. It introduces in a decisive way the mediating spring for the dialectic of Being and man: language. ;The elaboration of a philosophy of language then is instrumental to the success of ontology and philosophical anthropology alike. It is not a foreign element, however, introduced and imposed from the outside of Ricoeur's philosophical problematic, but a product of the very reflections it is developed to serve. So much is this the case that the development of a hermeneutically sensitive philosophy of language is a further moment in the mature expression of an ontology and a philosophy that would understand what it means for us to be. It is in behalf of this fundamental unity that Ricoeur so forcefully with his conceptual rivals from the schools of structuralism and semiotics