Part IV: Narrated Time;
Introduction;
Section 1: The Aporetics of Temporality;
1. The Time of the Soul and the Time of the World: The Dispute between Augustine and Aristotle;
2. Intuitive Time or Invisible Time? Husserl Confronts Kant;
3. Temporality, Historicality, Within-Time-Ness: Heidegger and the “Ordinary” Concept of Time;
Section 2: Poetics of Narrative: History, Fiction, Time;
4. Between Lived Time and Universal Time: Historical Time;
5. Fiction and Its Imaginative Variations on Time;
6. The Reality of the Past;
7. The World of the Text and the World of the Reader;
8. The Interweaving of History and Fiction;
9. Should We Renounce Hegel?;
10. Towards a Hermeneutics of Historical Consciousness;
Notes;
Bibliography;
Index.

In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur’s most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.
Ricoeur’s aim here is to explicate as fully as possible the hypothesis that has governed his inquiry, namely, that the effort of thinking at work in every narrative configuration is completed in a refiguration of temporal experience. To this end, he sets himself the central task of determing how far a poetics of narrative can be said to resolve the “aporias”—the doubtful or problematic elements—of time. Chief among these aporias are the conflicts between the phenomenological sense of time (that experienced or lived by the individual) and the cosmological sense (that described by history and physics) on the one hand and the oneness or unitary nature of time on the other. In conclusion, Ricoeur reflects upon the inscrutability of time itself and attempts to discern the limits of his own examination of narrative discourse.