Modern French Philosophy

About this book

This is a critical introduction to modern French philosophy commissioned from one of the liveliest contemporary practitioners and intended for an English-speaking readership. The dominant Anglo-Saxon reaction to philosophical development in France has for some decades been one of suspicion occasionally tempered by curiosity but more often hardening into dismissive rejection. But there are signs now of a more sympathetic interest and an increasing readiness to admit and explore shared concerns even if these are still expressed in a very different idiom and intellectual context. Vincent Descombes offers here a personal guide to the main movements and figures of the last forty-five years. He traces over this period the evolution of thought from a generation preoccupied with the three Hs - Hegel Husserl and Heidegger to a generation influenced since about 1960 by the three masters of suspicion - Marx Nietzsche and Freud. In this framework he deals in turn with the thought of Sartre Merleau-Ponty the early structuralists Foucault Althusser Serres Derrida and finally Deleuze and Lyotard. The internal intellectual history of the period is related to its institutional setting and the wider cultural and political context which has given French philosophy so much of its distinctive character.