 In the course of developing this anthropology, Ricoeur made several major methodological shifts, partly in response to changes in his intellectual setting as new developments came to speak to the topics he was dealing with, sometimes in ways that challenged his own approach, partly as he pursued questions that had arisen as a result of his published work or that had not yet been considered there. His early academic training was in the tradition of French reflexive philosophy, a tradition that seeks to understand how the “I” comes to be aware of itself and of its thought and action starting from the lived experience of reflexive consciousness, our being aware of ourselves as existing, thinking, and acting. This focus on reflexive consciousness always played a role in organizing Ricoeur’s thinking. His first major publications after World War II, though, were written using existential phenomenology and the French tradition of reflexive philosophy, reflecting not just his study of Husserl, which had begun prior to World War II but also of Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By 1960, however, Ricoeur had concluded that to study human reality properly, particularly given the existence of evil, he had to combine phenomenological description and analysis with hermeneutic interpretation. This shift led to an increasing focus on a theory of interpretation that could be grafted to phenomenology, an approach which he came to see was in fact called for by phenomenology. For this hermeneutic phenomenology, whatever is intelligible comes to us in and through our use of language to talk about our lived experience. While philosophical language and the categories it uses always aim at being founded on univocal concepts, as actually used language is always polysemic; it can have more than one meaning, more than one translation, so all uses of language necessarily call for interpretation. This hermeneutic or linguistic turn in Ricoeur’s thought did not require him to disavow the basic results of his earlier investigations. It did, however, lead him not only to revisit that work but also to see more clearly its broader implications, particularly in relation to and in response to the development of structuralism which he saw as a challenge to such a hermeneutic approach. In his later work, this led to an increasing emphasis on the fact that we live in time and in history. He took up this insight through the philosophy of discourse that he developed on the basis of the increased emphasis on language in his philosophy. His late writings also reflect a more direct concern for making sense of selfhood and personal identity as something that goes beyond the epistemological subject, and for ethics at the individual as well as the societal and political levels, leading to his essays on the idea of the just and his last book on the possibility of mutual recognition and states of peace.