France: The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, whose work on language, memory and identity influenced scholarship across the range of the human sciences, has died aged 92.
He had been ill for a number of months and died in his sleep on Friday at his home outside Paris, his son Marc said yesterday.
French politicians, including French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, president Jacques Chirac, and Communist Party leader Marie-George Buffet, joined in paying tributes to the thinker.
"The entire European humanist tradition is mourning one of its most talented spokesmen," said Mr Raffarin.
European recognition of Ricoeur's work came relatively late in his prolific career. Despite the publication from the late 1940s onwards of significant works on psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, metaphor and rhetoric, and of his three-volume study Time and Narrative (1983-85), he remained relatively ignored in France and spent long periods teaching in the US, his thought eclipsed by other French thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida.
It was not until 1988, when the Irish academic Richard Kearney co-directed a major colloquium on Ricoeur's work in Normandy, that he was accorded real credibility in his own country and that the importance of his writings on the relationship between societies and their founding narratives was fully appreciated.
While best known for Time and Narrative and for Oneself as an Other (1990), his exploration of personal identity in a moral context, Ricoeur continued to write and to publish right up to his final year, with the English translation of his Memory, History and Forgetting published in Spring of 2004.
In this book, Ricoeur examined the possibility that history "overly remembers" some events, such as the Holocaust, at the expense of others, such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in north Africa.
Orphaned during the first World War, drafted into the French army after a successful university career at Rennes and the Sorbonne, and held in a German prison camp for most of the second World War, Ricoeur vehemently opposed war, from the 1950s French campaign in Algeria to the Bosnian war in the 1990s.
In Memory, History and Forgetting, he argued that citizens of all countries had a responsibility to draw on a practical wisdom in the shaping of political decisions.
He was last year awarded the €1 million John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement, which honours fields not covered by the Nobel prizes.
A widower, he is survived by five children.