Throughout Ricœur’s philosophy, a cross-fertilization of Husserlian phenomenology with Kant-oriented criticism is attempted. The anchoring of phenomena on an ontological background should prevent both reality from being absorbed into an idealistic consciousness, and phenomenology from being boiled down to a philosophy of being. The present article seeks to investigate this attempt from the point of view of the relationship between Ricoeur’s speculation on reduction (largely dating from the 1950’s) and the notion of attestation he developed some 40 years later. This relationship will prove so close that it allows us to examine, through the epistemological and ontological value of attestation, the foundation and the limits of phenomenology both in the latter’s detour by way of analytic philosophy and in its link with being.