Le Meme Et L'autre: Quarante Cinq Ans De Philosophie Francaise (1933 1978) (Collection Critique) (French Edition)

By Vincent Descombes

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521296722
• ISBN13: 9780521296724
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Very Good Introductory Survey But Not for Beginners

In Descombes' slim volume, he gives an excellent introduction to modern French philosophy, presenting the leading figures and primary topics taken up by contemporary French philosophers. Despite the brevity, however, the text is by no means a "Cliff's Notes" covering modern French philosophy. The title is somewhat misleading in that Descombes limits his discussion to 20th-century French thinkers, and he restricts the topics he examines to dialectics and the philosophical issues surrounding the notion of being. He begins with a discussion of Alexandre Kojeve's introduction of Hegel's philosophy of dialectics to a French audience, and he then moves on to a discussion of phenomenology represented by Merleau-Ponty and then he discusses structuralism. These three subjects take up over half of Descombes' text. In the remainder he covers at a breakneck pace Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Klossowski and Lyotard, with brief mentions of other philosophers along the way. Obviously a narrow focus was necessary or we would be dealing with a multi-volume work. What makes Descombes' text so remarkable is how well he explains such difficult subjects as phenomenology and structuralism in such a short space. Entire volumes have been written on both of these topics alone. He even manages to make sense of Derrida's writings, something I did not believe possible. The book has some curious omissions. Lacan and Levi-Strauss without question belong in any survey of 20th-century French philosophy, and Descombes' discussions of these major figures is disappointingly scanty. He also gives short shrift to Jean-Paul Sartre (who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1964, but he refused to accept it); I believe he goes into greater depth on the writings of Husserl -- a German philosopher -- than he gives Sartre. The book's index is pitifully anemic, and also lacks any bibliography or recommendations for further readings whatsoever. There is only a two-page listing at the beginning of Descombes' book of the texts to which he refers most frequently. This is not so much for bibliographic purposes as it is for a convenient short-hand for referring to the frequently cited texts. These reservations stated, however, I highly recommend this text to anyone interested in learning more about 20th-century French philosophy as long as the reader keeps in mind that this book is not oriented towards beginners. The book assumes some acquaintance with the entirety of the history of philosophy, as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx also are brought into the discussion. This book leaves the reader wanting that multi-volume, more comprehensive text on modern French philosophy along the lines of W.K.C. Guthrie's outstanding volumes on ancient Greek philosophy.