Being, Essence and Substance in Plato and Aristotle

First taught and distributed in mimeographed form in Strasbourg during the 1953-1954 academic year, this Course (as we shall designate it for the rest of this book) certainly had been thought about and in preparation since 1949, if not earlier, as the documents now in the Ricoeur Archive in Paris attest. In 1949, Ricoeur had taught a course on “Plato and the Problem of the Soul.” There are two sets of handwritten documents from this time in the archive titled “Problems of the Soul in Plato’s Philosophy” (125 pages) and “Plato and the Divine” (45 pages). They include abbreviated words and things crossed out. The folder for the 1953-1954 course now in the archive is composed in part of a notebook entirely and carefully handwritten. It contains sections titled “I. Essence and Being in Plato” (96 pages) and “II. Aristotle” (100 pages). This latter portion includes a good number of pages that appear in the later mimeographed copy of the Course, but does not yet represent the definitive state of the text on Aristotle. Beyond this, there is an incomplete copy of the mimeographed course (59 pages) on whose cover is written: “Paul Ricoeur/Being, Essence, and Substance in Plato and Aristotle/Course taught at the University of Strasbourg in 1953-1954.”