Man in Religion and Theology: Ricoeur's Conception of Man

From Ricoeur's main works, which include Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950), History and Truth (1955), Fallible Man. Phenomenology of Sin, Vol.1 (1960), The Symbolism of Evil, Phenomenology of Sin, Vol.2 (1960), The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1969), The Rule of Metaphor (1975), Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980), Time and Narrative, Vol.1-3 (1983-85), From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics, II. (1986), Oneself as Another (1990), Memory, History, Forgetting (2000), etc., one would know that Ricoeur's thought was profoundly affected by his faith. With his broad reading which includes psychoanalysis, mythology, philosophy, sociology, literature, history, linguistics, he integrated all of them by phenomenology and narrative hermeneutics. Regarding the problems which he investigated all the life, the question with which he was concerned is the image of man in the sense of traditional theology or religion. Ricoeur's thought seems to resonate Kant's knotting question of the other three ones, namely, "What is man?" Not only questioning, he but also tried to find the answer, so that "humanity" in Ricoeur's philosophy might be understood as "man in religion and theology". Ricoeur attempts to rethink the matters of human being by a multi-faceted and diverse-perspective philosophizing This essay endeavors to explicate Ricoeur's philosophy as a whole in terms of "man in religion and theology".