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explanations of causal events in the brain are different from first-person reports aboutone’s experience. What occurs in the brain may indeed correspond to my experience, butmy experience cannot be reduced to what happens in the brain. One must investigateexperience phenomenologically, not through empirical techniques. 4Most recently, in Memory, History, and Forgetting (2004), Ricoeur undertakes a(Husserlian) phenomenological analysis of memory. The phenomenology of memorybegins with an analysis of the objects of memory, the memory-experiences one has beforeone’s mind; it then considers the act of searching for a given memory, of anamnesis andrecollection; finally, from memory as given and exercised, Ricoeur examines reflectivememory, or memory itself. This phenomenology of memory grounds the successivestudies on the epistemological nature of history and the activities of historians, andconcludes with a “hermeneutics of the historical condition” that culminates on the phenomenonof forgetting and forgiveness. Together they comprise a reflection on the problemof representing the past. It is Ricoeur’s most explicitly phenomenological work in years.Among the investigations he conducts are a phenomenology of imagination, of perception,of mistakes, of recollection, and of testimony. Phenomenological description -- i.e.,evidence -- is an inseparable part of historic understanding. 5Hermeneutics and Narrative TheoryClosely related to the phenomenological account of truth as approximation is thehermeneutic conception of truth as manifestation. Ricoeur shares with Heidegger a conceptionof truth as aletheia, which means bringing things out from concealment into theopen. According to Heidegger, aletheia means “taking entities out of their hiddenness andletting them be seen in their unhiddenness (their uncoveredness).” 6 Truth as manifestation,for Ricoeur, is the revelation and disclosure of hidden aspects of reality, which occurswhen we understand reference of creative discourses. All imaginative and creative usesof language improve our ability to express ourselves and extend our understanding of theworld. Symbols, myths, metaphors, and fiction can capture experience in ways thatordinary, descriptive language cannot. Ricoeur maintains that the reference of creativelanguage is “divided” or “split,” meaning that such writing points to aspects of the worldthat can only be suggested and referred to indirectly. Creative language refers to suchaspects of the world as if they were real and as if we could be there.In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur develops his thesis that the split-reference of creativediscourse discloses a possible way of being-in-the-world that remains hidden fromordinary language and first-order reference. A metaphor is an “heuristic fiction” that“redescribes” reality by referring to it in terms of something imaginative or fictional,allowing us to learn something about reality from fiction. I experience the world throughmy experience of creative discourse. Reading creates a clearing that opens up newpossibilities of being in the world. Heuristic fictions help us to perceive new relations andnew connections among things, broadening our ability to express ourselves and understandourselves. In Time and Narrative, the basic unit of meaning is a narrative, which is4Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Pierre Changeux, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and aPhilosopher Argue About Ethics, Human Nature and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2000), 33-69.5Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5-132.6Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:Harper & Row, 1962), 262.86