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Introduction
WALTER J. LOWE EMORY UNIVERSITY Paul Ricoeur was born in Valence, France in 1913. While studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, he came under the influence of the existentialist Gabriel Marcel. Interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, he studied the works of Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement. Ricoeur's writings range from his early explorations in philosophical anthropology, of which Fallible Man is the premier example, through subsequent studies of the religious symbolism of evil, Freudian psychoanalysis, metaphor, narrative, and interpretation theory generally. Since 1970, when he was appointed to the chair formerly held by Paul Tillich at the University of Chicago, he has divided his time between responsibilities in this country and in France. 1 Rich in texture, expansive in scope, and indefatigably exploratory in character, Ricoeur's is not a philosophy that lends itself to tidy summary. Still it may be possible, by way of introduction, to retrace something of the pathway along which his thought has moved: to indicate a few of the most basic concerns and then to show how those concerns, and the interaction between them, came to generate the particular works which he did in fact write. As a means of interpreting the institutions and works of art which constitute our culture, Ricocur has often sought, in and through those various expressions, an underlying human act, a generative "affirmation" of effort and desire. Without pressing the point unduly, we may ask to what extent Ricoeur's own thought, and particularly his early work, may be interpreted in the light of such an originary affirmation. This, then, is the question to be explored in the first section of the present Introduction. The second section will focus specifically upon the structure of Fallible Man, and the concluding section will seek to reinsert the anthropology of Fallible Man, so interpreted, into the larger context of Ricoeur's philosophy.

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