Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary

This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world.

Paul Ricœur (27 February 1913 – 20 May 2005) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. As such his thought is situated within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Erazim V. Kohák is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Boston University.