Tableau de la philosophie française

by Jean Wahl

Trois siècles de philosophie française de Descartes à Sartre. Une synthèse magistrale, d'une clarté et d'une précision remarquables, qui ne néglige aucun aspect des courants principaux de la pensée française.

Genres: Philosophy

178 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1962

About the author

French philosopher. Wahl was educated at the École Normale Supérieure. He was a professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, broken by World War II. He was in the U.S. from 1942 to 1945, having been interned as a Jew at the Drancy internment camp (north-east of Paris) and then escaped.

He began his career as a follower of Henri Bergson and the American pluralist philosophers William James and George Santayana. He is known as one of those introducing Hegelian thought in France in the 1930s (his book on Hegel was published in 1929). He was also a champion in French thought of the Danish proto-existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. These enthusiasms, which became the significant books Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929) and Études kierkegaardiennes (1938) were controversial, in the prevailing climate of thought. However, he influenced a number of key thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas and [Jean-Paul Sartre]. In the second issue of Acéphale, Georges Bataille's review, Jean Wahl wrote an article titled "Nietzsche and the Death of God", concerning Karl Jaspers' interpretation of this work. He became known as an anti-systematic philosopher, in favour of philosophical innovation and the concrete.

While in the USA, Wahl with Gustave Cohen and backed by the Rockefeller Foundation founded a 'university in exile', the École Libre des Hautes Études, in New York City. Later, at Mount Holyoke where he had a position, he set up the Décades de Mount Holyoke, also known as Pontigny-en-Amérique, modelled on meetings run from 1910-1939 by French philosopher Paul Desjardins (November 22, 1859 - March 13, 1940) at the site of the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny in Burgundy. These successfully gathered together French intellectuals in wartime exile, ostensibly studying the English language, with Americans including Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevenss and Roger Sessions. Wahl, already a published poet, made translations of poems of Stevens into French. He was also an avid reader of the Four Quartets and toyed with the idea of publishing a poetical refutation of the poem. (See, e.g., his "On Reading the Four Quartets." )

In post-war France Wahl was an important figure, as a teacher and editor of learned journals. In 1946 he founded the Collège philosophique, influential center for non-conformist intellectuals, alternative to the Sorbonne. Starting in 1950, he headed the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale.

Wahl translated the second hypothesis of the Parmenides of Plato as "Il y a de l'Un", and Jacques Lacan adopted his translation as a central point in psychoanalysis, as a sort of antecedent in the Parmenides of the analytic discourse. This is the existential sentence of psychoanalytic discourse according to Lacan, and the negative one is "Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" — there is no such a thing as a sexual relationship.

Reviews

[Amel Khennoussi · Rating 2 out of 5]

لم تعجبني طريقة عرض مختلف المدارس ، ربما يناسب المتخصصين اكثر، لكن حتى طريقة تنظيم الافكار ليست قوية ولا تناسب المختص ولا المبتدئ. بحيث يقفز من فكرة إلى فكرة ومن فيلسوف إلى فيلسوف ثم يعود للوراء وهكذا. الترجمة لن تعجبني أيضا(دار أقلام عربية) . على كل مضطرة لقراءة كتاب آخر لفهم مختلف الفلسفات..

[أسماء · Rating 3 out of 5]

الكتاب جيد للمتخصص، وثقيل على المبتدئ
حسبته في الوهلة الأولى كتابًا يتحدثُ عن الفلسفةِ الفرنسية عامةً من القرن السابع عشر وحتى العشرين تبين أنَّه عميق ويسرد الكلام سردًا دون توقف لذا يفتقرُ للتصنيف والتبويب.
ملاحظة: حجم الخط صغير و مزعج للعين .

[Dorian Neerdael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Livre lourd à lire car il consiste plus en une longue énumération d'auteurs plutôt qu'en explications claires et précises. Il s'adresse plutôt à des avertis en la matière.