ABSTRACT
Paul Ricoeur is one of the most challenging and enduring thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Valence, France, in 1913, he taught as professor of philosophy at the universities of Strasbourg, Paris and Chicago, and served as director for the Centre of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics in Paris in the 1970s and 1980s. But Ricoeur is much more than a brilliant intellectual negotiator between competing schools of thought. He also, and most significantly, developed his own particular brand of philosophical hermeneutics. The hermeneutic model of the text reveals complexities of meaning beyond the face-to-face of spoken dialogue. It goes beyond the direct reference of two interlocutors co-present to one another in an immediately identifiable situation 'here and now'. This chapter discusses Ricoeur's central claim that the working of the text is itself a process of 'semantic innovation'. In the case of the symbol, this involves a crossing of intentionalities at the level of the word.
