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Life
He spent sixty years arguing that we understand ourselves only by telling stories about ourselves: and that every such story is also, unavoidably, an interpretation that could have gone another way.
He invented phenomenology, the method of returning to the things themselves, and every major philosopher who followed had to pass through it.
Connection
Edmund Husserl phenomenology carried through captivity Paul Ricoeur — Ricoeur read and began translating Husserl by hand while a prisoner of war, and phenomenology remained the method beneath his later synthesis of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and biblical hermeneutics into a theory of narrative identity.
Ideas
Words
“The symbol gives rise to thought.”
“Time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative.”
“Back to the things themselves!”
“Philosophy as rigorous science — the dream is over.”
Key Moments
1940-1945
Translates Husserl by hand in a German POW camp
1983
Publishes Time and Narrative
1884-86
Studies under Brentano in Vienna
1916
Founds phenomenology at Freiburg
1933
Barred from the university library under Nazi law
Works
Time and Narrative
Logical Investigations