Paul Ricoeur: Paul Ricoeur, who has died in his sleep in his flat just outside Paris at the age of 92, was the last survivor of the mighty generation of French philosophers - including Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre - born before the first World War.
His first publication, L'Appel de L'Action, Reflexions d'un Étudiant Protestant (A Call To Action, Reflections Of A Protestant Student), was published in a journal for "Christian revolutionaries" in 1935, when he was 22. He was never to lose his commitment to problems of action, and his Christian faith gave stoical steadiness to an existence that was not always easy.
Ricoeur's mother died when he was a few weeks old, his father two years later, in the war. The orphaned child was looked after by relatives in Rennes, and his vocation was set from the age of 17, thanks to the inspired teacher of the philosophy class at his lycée.
He went on to study at the University of Rennes and became a teacher himself in 1935, soon after embarking on what was to be a long and happy marriage.
When war came, he was drafted into the French army and captured almost at once by the Germans. He spent the following five years in various prisoner-of-war camps for officers in north-east Germany.
He looked back on the experience without bitterness, describing it as "extraordinarily fruitful" because it had allowed him to devote himself to the study of German philosophy, which he was determined to revere in spite of everything. Kant and Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers always remained the guiding lights of his thought.
It was not that he found unanimity among them; on the contrary, he was at pains to accentuate their differences.
But Ricoeur was convinced that philosophical conflicts called not for hasty resolution or dogged defensiveness, but for sincere and anguished contemplation. It was necessary to "grant equal rights to rival interpretations", and philosophy would perish if it took the easy path of opting for one side or another of the essential dilemmas of existence.
The aim of all Ricoeur's work - some 20 books and 600 essays in all - was to teach us to feel the full force of authentic intellectual discomfort. After the second World War, Ricoeur's aversion to polemics allowed him to be overshadowed by more flamboyant colleagues. For nearly 10 years he taught history of philosophy at Strasbourg, deliberately immersing himself in a new philosophical system each academic year. So it was with massive preparation behind him that he moved to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1957, where he kept a cool head through two decades of raging philosophical warfare.
The Symbolism of Evil (1960) gave a new formulation to Ricoeur's sense of philosophical responsibility. His key term now was "hermeneutics", meaning the art of interpretation. "The symbol sets us thinking" in Ricoeur's famous phrase: we were not so much the creators of our symbols as their creatures, and philosophy was our ever-incomplete attempt to discern their multiple meanings. The purpose of thinking was not to gain knowledge, but to learn to consider the world in the light of our irremediable ignorance.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Ricoeur was drawn unwillingly into controversy: he found the so-called structuralist movement philosophically dogmatic, especially in its antagonism to subjectivity and to realities independent of language. His lucid criticisms of such masters as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser were all the more devastating for their generosity and restraint, qualities that were seldom reciprocated. His powerful book, Freud and Philosophy (1965) was scandalously neglected in France.
Ricoeur took his tasks as an educator very seriously, too. In the early 1960s he was appalled by the failure of the French university system to face up to new circumstances, especially the explosion in student numbers.
So it was with high ideals that he set off, in 1967, to help create a new type of university in the suburbs of Paris, at Nanterre. As dean of the school of letters the following year, he tried to impart his sceptical pluralism to a new generation of would-be revolutionary students, only to be rewarded with bins of rubbish emptied over his head.
From 1970 onwards Ricoeur began to extend his conception of hermeneutics, as well as opening himself to Anglo-American philosophical traditions, following a part-time appointment at Chicago. In The Rule of Metaphor (1975) and the three-volume Time and Narrative (1983-85), he tried to work out an understanding of subjectivity which would "replace the ego, master of itself, with the self, disciple of the text".
Subjectivity was neither a transcendent fact nor an ideological illusion; it was, rather, an artefact of the metaphors and narratives through which we endlessly seek to "configure" the riddles of our existence. So Ricoeur's late work came back to questions of action and morality and to the need, as he put it in the 1986 Gifford lectures, to treat "the self as an other".
These themes were connected with the problems of history and mourning in his last major work, Memory, History and Forgetting. (2000).
His wife and one of his two sons predeceased him.
Paul Ricoeur, born February 27th, 1913; died May 20th, 2005