Modern French Philosophy

by Vincent Descombes , Translated by L. Scott-Fox , J. M. Harding

• ISBN13: 9780521228374
• ISBN10: 0521228379
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1981-02-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 H's' - 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.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. vii
Note on abbreviations and translation	p. ix
Introduction: Philosophy in France	p. 1
The humanisation of nothingness	p. 9
The interpretation of Hegel	p. 9
The search for a concrete philosophy	p. 16
The objection of solipsism	p. 20
The origin of negation	p. 23
The end of history	p. 27
Negativity	p. 32
Identity and difference	p. 36
The question of enunciation	p. 39
Nothingness in Being and Nothingness	p. 48
The human origin of truth	p. 55
The soul and the body	p. 57
The earth does not revolve	p. 59
Does the dark side of the moon exist?	p. 62
The phenomenon	p. 65
The phenomenology of history	p. 69
Semiology	p. 75
The intellectual scene in 1960	p. 75
Structuralism	p. 77
What is a structural analysis?	p. 82
Communication	p. 92
Structures	p. 100
The humanist controversy	p. 103
The critique of history	p. 110
Nihilism	p. 110
Marxism in peril	p. 117
Superstructures	p. 126
Introduction to the problem of power	p. 131
Difference	p. 136
The radicalisation of phenomenology	p. 136
La differance	p. 142
Originary delay	p. 145
The search for a transcendental empiricism	p. 152
Critique of the dialectic	p. 156
The end of time	p. 168
Authority	p. 168
The fin-de-siecle disorder	p. 173
The tale (of the end of the tale) of the end of history	p. 180
Final remarks	p. 186
Index	p. 191
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