7. French philosophy today

2020 ◽  
pp. 98-115
Author(s):  
Stephen Gaukroger ◽  
Knox Peden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Today ◽  
Theological Turn ◽  
Ongoing Dialogue ◽  
The Revolution

Following the 1968 protests, the once-popular Marxism of Althusser declined in relevance. ‘French philosophy today: competing ambitions’ looks at the careers of Althusser’s pupils and successors. Much of twentieth-century French philosophy was a reckoning with phenomenology, which itself had risen as an alternative to existentialism. Some writers worried that phenomenology, as interpreted by Michael Henry and Emmanuel Levinas, was taking an overly theological turn. French philosophers were ready to move on from the Revolution, but ideas about who conferred power in the absence of a religious authority were as relevant as ever and harked back to the ongoing dialogue between philosophy and Christianity.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Watkin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Cautious Approach ◽  
Philosophy Today

French philosophy today is laying fresh claim to the human. This is not to be mistaken for an exercise in winding back the clock, nor is it a return to previous ideas of the human, much less a coordinated ‘human turn’. It is a series of fundamentally independent and yet strikingly simultaneous initiatives arising across the diverse landscape of French thought to transform and rework the figure of the human. Whereas the latter decades of the twentieth century adopted a decidedly critical and cautious approach to the question of ‘the human’, imprisoning it within the iron bars of scare quotes and burying it under caveats warning against its false universalism and dangerous totalitarianism, now we find ourselves entering a new moment of constructive transformation in which fresh and ambitious figures of the human are forged and discussed, and in which humanism itself is being reinvented and reclaimed in multiple ways. These new figures of the human take diverse and sometimes mutually antagonistic forms, but what unites them all is that they cannot be plotted on the spectrum running between twentieth-century humanism and antihumanism. Each in its own way rejects the assumptions that humanism and antihumanism share. By tracing these varied transformations of the human we can discern one of the most widespread, most surprising and potentially most transformative trends in contemporary French thought....

French Philosophy Today

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Watkin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Change ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Today ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
First Time ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy

After the humanism/anti-humanism debates of the 1940s and ’50s, and after the ‘death of man’ in the linguistic philosophy of the late twentieth-century, French philosophy today is laying fresh claim to the human. This is not to be mistaken for a return to previous ideas of the human, nor is it posthumanism, strictly speaking. It is a series of fundamentally independent and yet strikingly simultaneous initiatives arising in the writing of diverse French thinkers to transform and rework the figure of the human. This book brings together these new figures of the human for the first time, offering the a critique of this contemporary trend in terms of the three categories: the human as ‘capacity’ (Badiou and Meillassoux), as ‘substance’ (Malabou) and as ‘relation’ (Serres and Latour). Tracing these varied transformations of the human makes visible for the first time one of the most widespread, surprising and potentially transformative trends in contemporary French thought. This book draws out both the promises and perils inherent in today’s attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to “nature” and “culture”, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and to our own brains, arguing that the stakes of this project are high for our technologically advanced but socially atomised and ecologically vulnerable world.

scholarly journals Page Composing and Lettering Games: Experimentation in Italy in the 1930s

Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Bonciarelli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Book Design ◽  
Page Layout ◽  
Middlebrow Literature ◽  
The Revolution

The objective of this article is to analyze how or in what ways the most advanced visual experiments centred on “the book” as an object in the period between 1900 and 1930 in Italy, in particular in relation to the development of middlebrow literature. The article’s hypothesis is that the revolution brought about by Futurism soon touched on literature intended for a middlebrow reading public, attracted and interested by the paratextual presentation of the book and its physical aspects. This article focuses in particular on changes in page layout and on lettering games in paratextuality, to give a precise idea of how strong the thrust of Futurism was and how book design affected the visual culture of the beginning of the twentieth century in Italy.

scholarly journals The Concept in Life and the Life of the Concept: Canguilhem’s Final Reckoning with Bergson

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Basic Problem ◽  
History Of Biology ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Special Place ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Living Being

Foucault famously divided the history of twentieth-century French philosophy between a “philosophy of experience” and a “philosophy of the concept,” placing Bergson in the former camp and his teacher Canguilhem in the latter. This division has shaped the Anglophone reception of Canguilhem as primarily a historian and philosopher of biology. Canguilhem, however, was also a philosopher of life and a careful reader of Bergson. The recently-begun publication of Canguilhem’s Œuvres complètes has revealed the depth of this engagement, and a re-reading of Canguilhem’s final major statement on Bergson, the 1966 essay “The Concept and Life,” has thus become necessary. The basic problem of that essay is the relationship between knowledge and life in the history of biology and philosophy, with a special place for Bergson. Canguilhem’s strong criticism of him turns, however, on a misquotation. In claiming that Bergson fails to account for the struggle of the living being to maintain a species form, Canguilhem misconstrues the crucial Bergsonian distinction between vital order and geometrical identity; he thus misses the importance that Bergson accords to general biological tendencies, rather than to the generality of the species. Despite the differences on display in the 1966 essay, it will be argued that Canguilhem’s earlier remarks on Bergson show a surprising convergence in the underlying aim of each thinker’s biological philosophy: the call for a new ontology that grasps the ordered and intelligible character of life without relying on a principle of identity.

The Civil Service

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Public Utilities ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter examines the history of the civil service in Great Britain. It suggests that the revolution in Whitehall during the last two decades of the twentieth century transformed the civil service, and that many of the public utilities nationalised by the post-war Attlee government were privatised. Other major changes include the reduction in the size of the civil service and the application of market disciplines to it.

Subjectivity and Transcendence

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Wahl
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Future ◽  
Unpublished Letter ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
Raymond Aron ◽  
The One

Featuring replies and letters by Raymond Aron, Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, and many others, Wahl’s 1937 “Subjectivity and Transcendence” should be included among the most important debates in twentieth-century European philosophy. It is essential for understanding the secularization of Kierkegaard, and it provided a crucial forum in which to discuss and shape the future of existentialism. While revealing Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s debt to Kierkegaard, Wahl at the same time worries that any attempt to provide a philosophy of the insights that stem from Kierkegaard’s life would threaten either to fall into abstraction or to harbor implicit theological presuppositions. He also sets the stage for dialogue about the nature of transcendence by developing the concepts of “transascendence” and “transdescendence.” This chapter concludes with a previously unpublished letter Wahl wrote to Heidegger in which he provides a more detailed response to Heidegger’s contribution to the debate than the one given in “Subjectivity and Transcendence.”

Existence, Experience, and Transcendence

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Alexander Moore ◽  
Alan D. Schrift
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Life Career

This chapter offers an overview of Jean Wahl’s life, career, works, and influence on developments in twentieth-century French philosophy. Specific attention is paid to his introduction of Hegel and Kierkegaard into France, as well as his work on Nietzsche and Heidegger. Also discussed is his influence on Levinas and Deleuze, his relations with Bataille and Sartre, and his poetry and discussions of art and literature.

Looking Back at History of Madness

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Huffer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Looking Back

This essay offers an overview of History of Madness, including its place in Foucault's oeuvre, its publication and translation history. Huffer focuses especially on the significance of History of Madness as an under-read text whose philosophical and historical implications have not yet been adequately explored. She argues that a careful reading of History of Madness on its own terms offers resources for moving beyond some of the impasses that characterize not only twentieth-century French philosophy, but also many of the fields in the Anglophone world—especially feminist, queer, and critical race theory—that arose in the wake of a debate about madness.

After Of Habit

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-94
Author(s):  
Mark Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Lived Body ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
The Third ◽  
Paul Ricœur ◽  
Embodied Action

This chapter examines the reception of Ravaisson’s account of habit in later nineteenth- and twentieth-century French philosophy. The first two sections examine its reception in the work of Albert Lemoine, Léon Dumont, and Henri Bergson. The third section examines its reception in the work of the French phenomenologists and theorists of the lived body, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter shows how Ravaisson’s account of inclination relates to these notions of the lived body. In conclusion, it shows how contemporary Merleau-Ponty-inspired accounts of pre-reflective, embodied action as a form of ‘coping’ can be extended by Ravaisson’s concern for tendency and inclination in motor habit.

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