The Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy (Oxford Handbooks)

French philosophy is an internationally celebrated national philosophical tradition, and this Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy offers a comprehensive approach to its history since 1800. The Handbook features essays, written by renowned international specialists, illuminating key movements and positions, themes and thinkers in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and even twenty-first century French philosophy. The volume takes into account developments in recent historical scholarship by broadening the notion of Modern French Philosophy in two ways. Whereas recent approaches in the field have often ignored early nineteenth-century developments, this volume offers comprehensive treatment of the French thinking of this period in order to better grasp later developments. Moreover, the volume extends the canon at the other end of the period of Modern French Philosophy by including work on philosophers who have come to prominence only in the last ten or twenty years. The volume takes ‘French philosophy’ in a broad sense to include all philosophy carried out in France over the last 200 years, and it illuminates the institutional and cultural background of this national philosophical tradition in such a way as to provide a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of its unity and of its more famous moments in the twentieth century. Cover Copyright Contents Notes on Contributors 1. Introduction PART I MOVEMENTS AND POSITIONS 2. Maine de Biran and the Legacy of Ideology 3. Eclecticism and Its Discontents 4. Positivisms and Spiritualisms: Quarrels and Appropriations 5. Vacherot and His Circle: Philosophy and Religion in the Pantheism Controversy 6. Spiritualism as a Philosophy of Culture: Ravaisson and Boutroux 7. Charles Renouvier on the Necessary Conditions of the Scientific Mind: Passion, Habit, and Will 8. Bergson after Boutroux on Freedom and Contingency 9. Jean- Marie Guyau on Morality and Life 10. Léon Brunschvicg and the Development of French Neo- Kantianism 11. Simone Weil’s Practical Philosophy 12. Early Existentialisms 13. Historical Epistemology: A Broader and More Complex View 14. Merleau- Ponty: A Bergsonian in the Making 15. Frantz Fanon, Philosophizing (in) the Colonial Situation 16. Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch: Sociality and the Second- Person 17. Foucault and the Task of Philosophy 18. Ethics and Ontology in French Hermeneutics: The Case of Ricoeur 19. Deleuze or Lyotard? 20. French Phenomenology after 1961 21. Irigaray and Feminism in French Philosophy after Beauvoir 22. Deconstruction and Forgiveness: The Final Phase of Derrida’s Thought 23. Badiou’s Being and Event Trilogy and the Pas de Deux with Deleuze 24. The Non- Philosophy of François Laruelle PART II INFLUENCES 25. Descartes in Modern French Philosophy 26. Spinoza in Modern French Philosophy 27. Hegel in Modern French Philosophy 28. Marx in Modern French Philosophy 29. Heidegger in Modern French Philosophy 30. French Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition PART III THEMES 31. Aesthetics in Modern French Philosophy 32. The Concrete and the Abstract in Modern French Philosophy 33. The Question of Habit in Modern French Philosophy 34. Philosophical Historiography in Modern French Philosophy 35. Reason and Analysis in Modern French Philosophy 36. Desire in Modern French Philosophy 37. Life: Modern French Philosophy and the Life Sciences 38. Transcendence and Immanence in Modern French Philosophy 39. Structure in Modern French Philosophy 40. Literature and Modern French Philosophy 41. French Philosophy during the First World War Index French philosophy is an internationally celebrated national philosophical tradition, and this Oxford Handbook offers a comprehensive approach to its history since 1800. The Handbook features essays written by renowned international specialists, illuminating key movements and positions, themes and thinkers in nineteenth-, twentieth- and even twenty-first-century French philosophy. The volume takes into account developments in recent historical scholarship by broadening the notion of Modern French Philosophy in two ways. Whereas recent approaches in the field have often ignored early nineteenth-century developments, this volume offers comprehensive treatment of French thought of this period in order to grasp better later developments. Moreover, the volume extends the canon at the other end of the period of Modern French Philosophy by including work on philosophers who have come to prominence only in the last ten or twenty years. The volume takes 'French philosophy' in a broad sense to include all philosophy carried out in France over the last 200 years, and it illuminates the institutional and cultural background of this national philosophical tradition in such a way as to provide a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of its unity and of its more famous moments in the twentieth century.