The late 20th century saw a remarkable flourishing of philosophy in
France. The work of French philosophers is wide ranging, historically
informed, often reaching out beyond the boundaries of philosophy; they
are public intellectuals, taken seriously as contributors to debates
outside the academy. Gary Gutting tells the story of the development of a
distinctively French philosophy in the last four decades of the 20th
century. His aim is to arrive at an account of what it was to 'do
philosophy' in France, what this sort of philosophizing was able to
achieve, and how it differs from the
analytic philosophy dominant in Anglophone countries. His initial
focus is on the three most important philosophers who came to prominence
in the 1960s: Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. He
sets out the educational and cultural context of their work, as a basis
for a detailed treatment of how they formulated and began to carry out
their philosophical projects in the 1960s and 1970s. He gives a fresh
assessment of their responses to the key influences of Hegel and
Heidegger, and the fraught relationship of the new generation to their
father-figure Sartre. He concludes that Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze
can all be seen as developing their fundamental philosophical stances
out of distinctive readings of Nietzsche. The second part of the book
considers topics
and philosophers that became prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, such as
the revival of ethics in Levinas, Derrida, and Foucault, the return to
phenomenology and its use to revive religious experience as a
philosophical topic, and Alain Badiou's new ontology of the event.
Finally Gutting brings to the fore the meta-philosophical theme of the
book, that French philosophy since the 1960s has been primarily
concerned with thinking the impossible.Readership: Scholars and advanced students of modern philosophy and the history of European thought.
