As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gabriel Marcel.

In 2000, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory.

[12] Paul's father Jules, who served as a sergeant in the 75th Infantry Regiment of the French army during World War I, went missing in Perthes-lès-Hurlus near the beginning of the Second Battle of Champagne (25 September – 6 November 1915).

[13][14] Some writers have stated that before World War I began, Paul's father (Léon "Jules" Ricœur) was a professor of English at the Lycée Emile Loubet in Valence.

[22] Ricœur received his bachelor's degree in 1932 from the University of Rennes[10] and began studying philosophy, and especially phenomenology, at the Sorbonne in 1933–34, where he was influenced by Gabriel Marcel.

His unit was captured during the German invasion of France in 1940 and he spent the next five years as a prisoner of war in Oflag II-D.[6] 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.

In 1950, he received his State 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 published the same year as Philosophie de la Volonté I: Le Volontaire et l'Involontaire (Philosophy of the Will I: The Voluntary and the Involuntary).

[33] Nanterre was intended as an experiment in progressive education, and Ricœur hoped that he could create a university in accordance with his vision, free of the stifling atmosphere of the tradition-bound Sorbonne and its overcrowded classes.

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, the citation being "[f]or 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.

[37] That same year, he and his co-author André LaCocque (professor emeritus of Hebrew Bible at Chicago Theological Seminary) were awarded the Gordon J. Laing Award by the University of Chicago's Board of University Publications for their book Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies.

On 29 November 2004, he was awarded with the second John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences (shared with Jaroslav Pelikan).

[39][40] French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin declared that "the humanist European tradition is in mourning for one of its most talented exponents".

It is the task of this hermeneutics to show that existence arrives at expression, at meaning, and at reflection only through the continual exegesis of all the significations that come to light in the world of culture.

Existence becomes a self – human and adult – only by appropriating this meaning, which first resides "outside," in works, institutions, and cultural movements in which the life of the spirit is justified.

The French philosopher chooses the model of the phenomenology of religion, in relation to psychoanalysis, stressing that it is characterized by a concern on the object.