Contemporary French philosophy

Author: Vincent Descombes
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-02-01
Features: French philosophy is philosophy expressed in French. It emerged when Descartes responded to Montaigne's Essais with his Discourse on the Method and the three accompanying essays on method, but what emerged alongside Descartes' challenge to Montaigne was not just French philosophy. Both Hegel and Heidegger agreed: the pursuit of truth, characterized by absolute certainty, marks the advent of modern philosophy. In the recent evolution of French philosophy, the generation known as the "Three H's" after 1945 transitioned to the "Three Skeptical Masters" from 1960 onwards: the Three H's are Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, while the Three Skeptical Masters are Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Why were the figures revered as saints between 1930 and 1960 abandoned in the 1960s, making way for new arrivals? The emergence of a new authoritative trio, a whole generation of which drew the same conclusions from reading Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, is indeed intriguing. Merleau-Ponty said: "They encountered not so much a new philosophy as the recognition of something they had been waiting for." Clearly, their interpretation betrayed the meaning of the masters themselves, but betrayal might just be a way of illuminating what Heidegger called the "unthought" inherent in that thought.
Author Bio: Vincent Descombes (born 1943) is a contemporary French philosopher specializing in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. His notable achievement is his critique of what he calls the "cognitivist" tendency—the view prevalent in the philosophy of mind that reduces thoughts and psychological facts to physical facts about the brain. He has also written Le Platonisme, L'inconscient malgrélui, Objects of All Sorts: A Philosophical Grammar, Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events, and The Mind's Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism.