French philosopher Paul Ricoeur is one of the most important philosophers of hermeneutics from outside Germany, which is the birthplace of philosophical hermeneutics. The roots of philosophical hermeneutics go back to medieval religious hermeneutics that was devised to systemize the interpretation of the Holy Bible. This religious hermeneutics revolves around what is known as the fourfold senses of the texts of the Scriptures. This means that the text has more than one sense: the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical. In addition, according to this hermeneutics, each reader can come out with a meaning of the text which s/he can relate to her/his here and now. The hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur is greatly influenced by medieval religious hermeneutics as it also revolves around texts with multiple meanings, i. e. symbolic texts. In his theory, Ricoeur concentrates on the ontological dimension of language which turns the text into a mirror in which the reader can see her/himself and understand her/his being and world. Ricoeur's theory of interpretation, which can be applied to literary texts, can be described as a reader-oriented critical theory. It is the reader who creates the meaning of the text after freeing it from its author and all that in view of which it was written. It is also the reader who understands her/himself and her/his world while trying to understand the text.