Cleveland, Ohio
| Judith Butler | |
|---|---|
|
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| Full name | Judith Butler |
| Born | February 24, 1956 Cleveland, Ohio |
| Era | 20th / 21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Continental Philosophy, Third-Wave Feminism, Critical Theory, Queer Theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism |
| Main interests | Feminist Theory, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Discourse, Embodiment, Sexuality, Jewish Philosophy |
| Notable ideas | Sex and gender as social construction, performativity |
Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956, Cleveland, Ohio) is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is the Maxine Elliott professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, and her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s, between different teaching/research appointments (such as at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University), she was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism. Her most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy, engaging in particular with "pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence."[1][2]
Gender Trouble was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages[citation needed]. Alluding to the similarly named 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble starring the drag queen Divine,[3] Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy!.[4]
The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender. This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural." Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.[5]
A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.[6] The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler’s account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural.[7] In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.[8]
The concept of gender performativity is at the core of Butler's work. It extends beyond the doing of gender and can be understood as a full-fledged theory of subjectivity. Indeed, if her most recent books have shifted focus away from gender, they still treat performativity as theoretically central.
Bodies That Matter seeks to clear up readings and misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.[9] To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:
Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.[10]
Iterability, in its endless undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.
In Excitable Speech, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. She argues that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance. She develops a new conception of censorship’s complex workings, supplanting the myth of the independent subject who wields the power to censor with a theory of censorship as an effect of state power and, more primordially, as the condition of language and discourse itself.
Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state’s power to censor. Butler warns that such appeals to state power may backfire on those like MacKinnon who seek social change, in her case to end patriarchal oppression, through legal reforms. She cites for example the R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul 1992 Supreme Court case, which overturned the conviction of a teenager for burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family, in the name of the First Amendment.[citation needed]
Deploying Foucault’s argument from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.[11] As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control.[12] Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic “I” is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".[13]
Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing J.L. Austin's concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context.[citation needed] Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its illocutionary force, varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words, including hate, abstractly.[citation needed] On this basis, Butler rejects arguments like Richard Delgado’s which justify the censorship of certain specific words by claiming the use of those words constitutes hate speech in any context. In this way, Butler underlines the difficulty inherent in efforts to systematically identify hate speech.
Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of her other books. Butler revisits and refines her notion of performativity, which is the focus of Gender Trouble.
In her discussion of intersex, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically "reassigned" from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a step father to his wife's 3 children, and went on to tell his story in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl which he wrote with John Colapinto. Reimer had committed suicide in 2004.[14]
In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself, the limits of self-knowledge. Borrowing from Adorno, Foucault, Nietzsche, Laplanche, Cavarero and Levinas, among others, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject as a relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject’s formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place. The subject is therefore dispossessed of itself by another or others as the very condition of its being at all, and this process by which I become myself only in relation to others and therefore cannot own myself completely, this constitutive dispossession, is the opacity of the contemporary subject to itself, what I cannot know, possess, and master consciously about myself.
Butler then turns to the ethical question: If my narrative account of myself is necessarily incomplete, breaking down tellingly at the point precisely when "I" am called to elucidate the foundations of this "I", my genesis and ontology, what kind of ethical agent, or "I", am "I"?[citation needed] Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection. "You may think that I am in fact telling a story about the prehistory of the subject, one that I have been arguing cannot be told. There are two responses to this objection. (1) That there is no final or adequate narrative reconstruction of the prehistory of the speaking "I" does not mean we cannot narrate it; it only means that at the moment when we narrate we become speculative philosophers or fiction writers. (2) This prehistory has never stopped happening and, as such, is not a prehistory in any chronological sense. It is not done with, over, relegated to a past, which then becomes part of a causal or narrative reconstruction of the self. On the contrary, that prehistory interrupts the story I have to give of myself, makes every account of myself partial and failed, and constitutes, in a way, my failure to be fully accountable for my actions, my final "irresponsibility," one for which I may be forgiven only because I could not do otherwise. This not being able to do otherwise is our common predicament" (page 78).
Instead she argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself.[citation needed] Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human.[citation needed] To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.[citation needed]
Frames of War is Butler's most recent work.
In a London Review of Books article published in August 2003, Butler has identified herself as an anti-Zionist Jewish American who is concerned what she claims is a loss of academic freedom implicitly advocated by pro-Israeli groups.[15] She expounds upon her views on Zionism in a section of Precarious Life examining a debacle surrounding Harvard President Lawrence Summers. On September 7, 2006, she participated in a faculty-organized teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing Israel over the 2006 Lebanon-Israel war.[16]
Butler’s work has been extremely influential in the field of gender studies, and in cultural studies, philosophy, and literary criticism. The extent of Butler’s influence may be approximated by referring to the website for the University of California, Irvine’s Critical Theory Institute, which hosts a list of references to Butler’s work that includes hundreds of titles. The list is not comprehensive, since new analyses of Butler’s work are still being written. [17]
Butler has been called "one of the superstars of '90s academia, with a devoted following of grad students nationwide"[18], "the most famous feminist philosopher in the United States", "the queer theorist par excellence", and "the most brilliantly eclectic theorist of sexuality in recent years"[19].
"Lois McNay claims that Butler's work has influenced feminist understandings of gender identity (1999: 175)"[19]. More specifically, some theorists have built off Butler’s work and the idea of gender performativity in new directions. For example, Susan A. Speer and Jonathan Potter claim that it gives new insight in several areas, especially in the concept of heterosexism. However, although Speer and Potter find Butler’s work useful in this respect, they find her work too abstracted to be usefully applied to “real-life situations.” For this reason, they pair a reading of Butler with Discursive Psychology in order to extend Butler’s ideas to real-world scenarios.[20]
Susan Bordo has criticized Butler for reducing gender to language. Bordo argues that the body is a major part of gender, thus implicitly opposing Butler’s conception of gender as performed. [21]
Peter Digeser argues that Butler’s idea of performativity is too pure to account for identity. Digeser doubts that pure performativity is possible, and argues that in viewing the gendered individual as purely performed, Butler ignores the gendered body, which Bordo also argues is extremely important. Digeser argues that neither an essentialist nor a performative notion of gender should be used in the political sphere, as both simplify gender too much.[22]
Butler, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, participated in a discourse about each others’s work in 1995. Fraser argued that Butler’s focus on performativity has distanced her from “everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves … Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?”[23] Fraser argues that Butler needs to fully commit to her positions by way of justifying them and thus validating them, as this is the only way to achieve a political impact. Like Speer and Potter, Fraser also argues that Butler’s focus on language removes her from real-world issues and makes her work difficult to be applied to real-life situations. Fraser has also argued that homophobia is a result of cultural influences rather than economic, a position which Butler has argued directly against in an essay titled “Merely Cultural.”
Butler's prose-style has generated some controversy.[24] In 1998, Denis Dutton's journal Philosophy and Literature "awarded" Butler the first prize in its "Bad Writing Competition," which claims to "celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles."[25] Dutton discontinued this "award" after being heavily criticized for its hostile spirit.[26] In response to Dutton's criticism, Butler wrote a letter to the London Review of Books and an op-ed piece in the New York Times, in which she argued that writing clearly can make the author too reliant on common sense and as such make language lose its potential to "shape the world" and shake up the status quo.[27][28] Alan Sokal, in turn, argued against Butler's op-ed by letter, stating that "Bad Writing Has No Defense".[29] Stephen K. Roney wrote an article addressing Butler's arguments in the journal Horizons, in which he argued that "many—indeed, most—generally recognized “great thinkers” have been clear and lucid in their writing[...] Is Butler claiming to be deeper than all of them?"[30]
The issue of writing style is not trivial. Postmodern theorists argue that (modernist) claims that language ought to have "clarity" are linked to naive understandings of language in which it can simply convey or relay an already existing truth. Since the Linguistic turn in Western philosophy, this has been an important and controversial issue. The arguments around Butler's writing style are related to this issue: for modernists who believe in an objective reality Butler's writing is likely to seem "bad", whereas for postmodernists the idea of a text that seriously challenges traditional ideas while remaining "clear and lucid" to those who embrace them is almost self-contradictory.[citation needed] Not surprisingly, the epistemological controversy around language is mirrored by similar controversies around the writing styles of theorists like Butler. Butler's writing about gender is illustrative of this: the taken-for-granted assumption of "natural" biological sex (as a basis for "cultural" gender) makes her arguments all but impossible to articulate in the "clear" language of everyday conversation, because such language is saturated with the very assumptions she is challenging.[citation needed] It becomes necessary to write very carefully in terms that avoid everyday understandings of sex and gender; and such writing appears as "obscurantism" to those who either do not understand her arguments, or disagree with her (and other postmodern theorists') basic assumptions about language.[citation needed]
Paul Ricœur (February 27, 1913 in Valence, France – May 20, 2005 in Chatenay Malabry, France) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. As such, he is connected to two other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Contents[hide] |
Ricœur was born in a devout Protestant family, making him a member of a religious minority in Catholic France.
Ricœur's father died in a 1915 World War I battle when Ricœur was only two years old. He was raised by his paternal grandparents and an aunt in Rennes, France, with a small stipend afforded to him as a war orphan. Ricœur, whose penchant for study was fueled by his family's Protestant emphasis on Bible study, was bookish and intellectually precocious. Ricœur received his licence in 1933 from the University of Rennes and began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1934, where he was influenced by Gabriel Marcel. In 1935, he was awarded the second-highest agrégation mark in the nation for philosophy, presaging a bright future.
World War II interrupted Ricœur's career, and he was drafted to serve in the French army in 1939. His unit was captured during the German invasion of France in 1940 and he spent the next five years as a prisoner of war. His detention camp was filled with other intellectuals such as Mikel Dufrenne, who organized readings and classes sufficiently rigorous that the camp was accredited as a degree-granting institution by the Vichy government. During this time he read Karl Jaspers, who was to have a great influence on him. He also began a translation of Edmund Husserl's Ideas I.
Ricœur taught at the University of Strasbourg between 1948 and 1956, the only French university with a Protestant faculty of theology. In 1950, he received his doctorate, submitting (as is customary in France) two theses: a "minor" thesis translating Husserl's Ideas I into French for the first time, with commentary, and a "major" thesis that he would later publish as Le Volontaire et l'Involontaire. Ricœur soon acquired a reputation as an expert on phenomenology, then the ascendent philosophy in France.
In 1956, Ricœur took up a position at the Sorbonne as the Chair of General Philosophy. This appointment signaled Ricœur's emergence as one of France's most prominent philosophers. While at the Sorbonne, he wrote Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil published in 1960, and Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation published in 1965. These works cemented his reputation. Jacques Derrida was an assistant to Ricœur during this time.
From 1965 to 1970, Ricœur was an administrator at the newly founded University of Nanterre in suburban Paris. Nanterre was intended an experiment in progressive education, and Ricœur hoped that here he could create a university in accordance with his vision, free of the stifling atmosphere of the tradition-bound Sorbonne and its overcrowded classes. Nevertheless, Nanterre became a hotbed of protest during the student uprisings of May 1968 in France. Ricœur was derided as an "old clown" and tool of the French government.
Disenchanted with French academic life, Ricœur taught briefly at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, before taking a position at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1970 to 1985. His study culminated in The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning of Language published in 1975 and the three-volume Time and Narrative published in 1984, 1985, and 1988. Ricoeur gave the Gifford Lectures in 1985/86, published in 1992 as Oneself as Another. This work built on his discussion of narrative identity and his continuing interest in the self.
Time and Narrative secured Ricœur's return to France in 1985 as an intellectual superstar. His late work was characterised by a continuing cross-cutting of national intellectual traditions; for example, some of his latest writing engaged the thought of the American political philosopher John Rawls.
In 1999 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy "For his capacity in bringing together all the most important themes and indications of 20th century philosophy, and re-elaborating them into an original synthesis which turns language - in particular, that which is poetic and metaphoric - into a chosen place revealing a reality that we cannot manipulate, but interpret in diverse ways, and yet all coherent. Through the use of metaphor, language draws upon that truth which makes of us that what we are, deep in the profundity of our own essence".
On November 29, 2004, he was awarded with the second John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences (shared with Jaroslav Pelikan).
Paul Ricœur died on May 20, 2005 in his home, of natural causes. French Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin declared that "the humanist European tradition is in mourning for one of its most talented exponents".Paul Ricœur (February 27, 1913 in Valence, France – May 20, 2005 in Chatenay Malabry, France) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. As such, he is connected to two other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Contents[hide] |
Ricœur was born in a devout Protestant family, making him a member of a religious minority in Catholic France.
Ricœur's father died in a 1915 World War I battle when Ricœur was only two years old. He was raised by his paternal grandparents and an aunt in Rennes, France, with a small stipend afforded to him as a war orphan. Ricœur, whose penchant for study was fueled by his family's Protestant emphasis on Bible study, was bookish and intellectually precocious. Ricœur received his licence in 1933 from the University of Rennes and began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1934, where he was influenced by Gabriel Marcel. In 1935, he was awarded the second-highest agrégation mark in the nation for philosophy, presaging a bright future.
World War II interrupted Ricœur's career, and he was drafted to serve in the French army in 1939. His unit was captured during the German invasion of France in 1940 and he spent the next five years as a prisoner of war. His detention camp was filled with other intellectuals such as Mikel Dufrenne, who organized readings and classes sufficiently rigorous that the camp was accredited as a degree-granting institution by the Vichy government. During this time he read Karl Jaspers, who was to have a great influence on him. He also began a translation of Edmund Husserl's Ideas I.
Ricœur taught at the University of Strasbourg between 1948 and 1956, the only French university with a Protestant faculty of theology. In 1950, he received his doctorate, submitting (as is customary in France) two theses: a "minor" thesis translating Husserl's Ideas I into French for the first time, with commentary, and a "major" thesis that he would later publish as Le Volontaire et l'Involontaire. Ricœur soon acquired a reputation as an expert on phenomenology, then the ascendent philosophy in France.
In 1956, Ricœur took up a position at the Sorbonne as the Chair of General Philosophy. This appointment signaled Ricœur's emergence as one of France's most prominent philosophers. While at the Sorbonne, he wrote Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil published in 1960, and Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation published in 1965. These works cemented his reputation. Jacques Derrida was an assistant to Ricœur during this time.
From 1965 to 1970, Ricœur was an administrator at the newly founded University of Nanterre in suburban Paris. Nanterre was intended an experiment in progressive education, and Ricœur hoped that here he could create a university in accordance with his vision, free of the stifling atmosphere of the tradition-bound Sorbonne and its overcrowded classes. Nevertheless, Nanterre became a hotbed of protest during the student uprisings of May 1968 in France. Ricœur was derided as an "old clown" and tool of the French government.
Disenchanted with French academic life, Ricœur taught briefly at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, before taking a position at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1970 to 1985. His study culminated in The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning of Language published in 1975 and the three-volume Time and Narrative published in 1984, 1985, and 1988. Ricoeur gave the Gifford Lectures in 1985/86, published in 1992 as Oneself as Another. This work built on his discussion of narrative identity and his continuing interest in the self.
Time and Narrative secured Ricœur's return to France in 1985 as an intellectual superstar. His late work was characterised by a continuing cross-cutting of national intellectual traditions; for example, some of his latest writing engaged the thought of the American political philosopher John Rawls.
In 1999 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy "For his capacity in bringing together all the most important themes and indications of 20th century philosophy, and re-elaborating them into an original synthesis which turns language - in particular, that which is poetic and metaphoric - into a chosen place revealing a reality that we cannot manipulate, but interpret in diverse ways, and yet all coherent. Through the use of metaphor, language draws upon that truth which makes of us that what we are, deep in the profundity of our own essence".
On November 29, 2004, he was awarded with the second John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences (shared with Jaroslav Pelikan).
Paul Ricœur died on May 20, 2005 in his home, of natural causes. French Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin declared that "the humanist European tradition is in mourning for one of its most talented exponents".
Paul Ricœur (February 27, 1913 in Valence, France – May 20, 2005 in Chatenay Malabry, France) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. As such, he is connected to two other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Contents[hide] |
Ricœur was born in a devout Protestant family, making him a member of a religious minority in Catholic France.
Ricœur's father died in a 1915 World War I battle when Ricœur was only two years old. He was raised by his paternal grandparents and an aunt in Rennes, France, with a small stipend afforded to him as a war orphan. Ricœur, whose penchant for study was fueled by his family's Protestant emphasis on Bible study, was bookish and intellectually precocious. Ricœur received his licence in 1933 from the University of Rennes and began studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1934, where he was influenced by Gabriel Marcel. In 1935, he was awarded the second-highest agrégation mark in the nation for philosophy, presaging a bright future.
World War II interrupted Ricœur's career, and he was drafted to serve in the French army in 1939. His unit was captured during the German invasion of France in 1940 and he spent the next five years as a prisoner of war. His detention camp was filled with other intellectuals such as Mikel Dufrenne, who organized readings and classes sufficiently rigorous that the camp was accredited as a degree-granting institution by the Vichy government. During this time he read Karl Jaspers, who was to have a great influence on him. He also began a translation of Edmund Husserl's Ideas I.
Ricœur taught at the University of Strasbourg between 1948 and 1956, the only French university with a Protestant faculty of theology. In 1950, he received his doctorate, submitting (as is customary in France) two theses: a "minor" thesis translating Husserl's Ideas I into French for the first time, with commentary, and a "major" thesis that he would later publish as Le Volontaire et l'Involontaire. Ricœur soon acquired a reputation as an expert on phenomenology, then the ascendent philosophy in France.
In 1956, Ricœur took up a position at the Sorbonne as the Chair of General Philosophy. This appointment signaled Ricœur's emergence as one of France's most prominent philosophers. While at the Sorbonne, he wrote Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil published in 1960, and Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation published in 1965. These works cemented his reputation. Jacques Derrida was an assistant to Ricœur during this time.
From 1965 to 1970, Ricœur was an administrator at the newly founded University of Nanterre in suburban Paris. Nanterre was intended an experiment in progressive education, and Ricœur hoped that here he could create a university in accordance with his vision, free of the stifling atmosphere of the tradition-bound Sorbonne and its overcrowded classes. Nevertheless, Nanterre became a hotbed of protest during the student uprisings of May 1968 in France. Ricœur was derided as an "old clown" and tool of the French government.
Disenchanted with French academic life, Ricœur taught briefly at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, before taking a position at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1970 to 1985. His study culminated in The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning of Language published in 1975 and the three-volume Time and Narrative published in 1984, 1985, and 1988. Ricoeur gave the Gifford Lectures in 1985/86, published in 1992 as Oneself as Another. This work built on his discussion of narrative identity and his continuing interest in the self.
Time and Narrative secured Ricœur's return to France in 1985 as an intellectual superstar. His late work was characterised by a continuing cross-cutting of national intellectual traditions; for example, some of his latest writing engaged the thought of the American political philosopher John Rawls.
In 1999 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Philosophy "For his capacity in bringing together all the most important themes and indications of 20th century philosophy, and re-elaborating them into an original synthesis which turns language - in particular, that which is poetic and metaphoric - into a chosen place revealing a reality that we cannot manipulate, but interpret in diverse ways, and yet all coherent. Through the use of metaphor, language draws upon that truth which makes of us that what we are, deep in the profundity of our own essence".
On November 29, 2004, he was awarded with the second John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences (shared with Jaroslav Pelikan).
Paul Ricœur died on May 20, 2005 in his home, of natural causes. French Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin declared that "the humanist European tradition is in mourning for one of its most talented exponents".