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intention; an experiment that confirms the hypothesis is a filled intention. All evidence isthe fulfilling of an empty intention with the appropriate experience (i.e., the approximationof the meaning-giving intention to the presence of the object meant). Truth is, therefore,the clear articulation of the experience of evident presence. 2Ricoeur devoted much of his early career to patient criticism and appropriation ofHusserl. In Freedom and Nature (1950), for example, Ricoeur retains Husserl’s conceptionof the fulfillment of intentionality but applies it to a phenomenology of the will. Hedefines voluntary action in terms of a will that projects and decides the direction of anaction to be done by me that is within my capabilities. To decide is to anticipate the futurebased on my capability or power to execute that action. A phenomenology of voluntaryaction shows that the realization of a decision is the fulfillment of a project or anintention-to-do something that is within my power. The intentionality of a project is athought, but only the execution of a decision fulfills the intentionality of the project. Anaction fulfills a decision somewhat like a perception fulfills an empty theoreticalintention. 3Phenomenology continues to play a role in Ricoeur’s recent major works. In OneselfAs Another (1990), Ricoeur uses a typical phenomenological argument against Parfit, whoquestions the nature of our personal identity with examples of brain duplication, memorytransplantation, and cloning machines. Ricoeur replies that such thought experiments failto appreciate that human beings are not merely their brains and bodies, but corporealbeings who inhabit the world and who have intrinsic, not mere extrinsic, relations to thatworld. Our “belonging” to the world is the condition for the possibility for any reflectionon or discourse about the world. Yet a description of belonging is precisely what isignored by personal identity thought experiments about cloning and brain duplication.Ricoeur turns to phenomenology to develop a notion of the self that is fundamentallyrelated to its surroundings and community.In his exchange with neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux in What Makes us Think?(2002), Ricoeur again returns to phenomenology, this time to correct Changeux’s attemptto use biological explanations for all aspects of human experience. This research program,known as “connectionism,” seeks to give an account of experience solely in terms of brainfunction. Changeux hopes to find a “third discourse” that would reconcile mind and bodyand eventually lead to a “neuronal” link between scientific knowledge (of the brain) andthe normative prescriptions (of human agency). Ricoeur believes such an endeavor isdoomed to fail, because the very premise of connectionism is confused. His argument isvintage phenomenology; the argument is based on an appeal to description. Third-person2Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960),11-23, 46-64. According to Husserl, absolutely indubitable evidence would require full presence oradequate givenness. Adequate evidence is absolute self-givenness, which is beyond question. Suchevidence would be a completely fulfilled intention in which the object is self-given in an absolutelyimmediate seeing. However, such absolute certainty is, in principle, impossible to achieve. Experience isnever completely fulfilled. There are always expectant and attendant meanings that mediate presence withabsence. There are always implicit, co-present aspects of consciousness that form the inner and outerhorizons of experience. Intentionality always intends beyond itself. There are always potentialities, implicitin every intentional act, that can never be completely accounted for. Experience itself provides the cluesfor the further experiences that are necessary to confirm, correct and fulfill such implicit intentionalities.The perspectival character of experience is evidence that things are never fully present in a complete andabsolute manner. Complete fulfillment is an infinite task that could never be completed, and absolutecertainty can never be attained. Instead, full presence functions as a limit idea that guides the gradualfulfillment of intentions.3Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohak(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 135-197.85