This work investigates how phenomenology is articulated in Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the concept of decision in Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950), first volume of his unfinished trilogy, Philosophy of the Will. Initially, we describe his adoption of phenomenology and investigate which methodological and thematic aspects allow us to affiliate it to Husserlian thought. Then, we follow Ricoeur’s pure eidetic description of the act of deciding, which guarantees in it the presence of intentionality and reference to a self. These essential features allow him to conceptualize an intermediate path in the analysis of human will, integrating body and duration in the structure of decision without the risk of ending up, on the one side, in determinism, and on the other, in absolute freedom. Finally, we see how these elements, proper to existence, come into an analysis which is directed by the eidetic description’s findings, and investigate in what measure Ricoeur tensions the limits of phenomenology.
KEYWORDS: Ricoeur. Phenomenology. Husserl. Will. Decision.