Abstract

Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur represent approximately one hundred years of French Continental philosophical thought. Each of these authors has a decisively different definition of self and meaning that stems, as argued, from their equally different definitions of human time. Under close inspection, it seems that the common thesis that ties all three philosophers together is that a particular notion of the temporal present begets a particular notion of self that begets, in turn, a particular form of meaning that authenticates that self