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In modern times, it is not easy to present the indictment of new ideas. The governments of most countries of the world do not like the expression of ideas. But from time to time, such philosophers or thinkers come forward in every country of the world, who get social acceptance for their different thinking. In this sequence of modern philosophers, we are introducing you to ten famous philosophers of France. Please read the article till the end

10 Modern Philosophers of France

Jacques Ranciere-(1940-)

 

Jacques Ranciere was born in 1940 in Algiers. He was a student of Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure and participated in the writing of Lier le Capital, a major study of Marx's thought that originated from a symposium organized by Althusser at the ENS in 1965. He then distanced himself from his teacher and in 1974 published La lecon d'Althusser, a book in which he criticized his approach.

Taking his intellectual autonomy, he became a thinker of democracy in its most radical sense and became interested in the question of worker emancipation. This work led him to a thesis, published in 1981 under the title La Nuit des Proletaires (Archive of the Dreams of the Working Class).

Jacques Rancière is the author of many famous works that are today considered classics. In The Philosopher and His Poor (1983) and The Ignorant Master (1987), he is interested in the question of intellectual emancipation, questioning traditional hierarchies. With Le Partage du sensible (La Fabrique, 2000), he offers an original approach to the relationship between aesthetics and politics, which would be a landmark. In 2005, he published La haine de la démocratie (La Fabrique, 2005), which questions the sources of the resurgence of anti-democratic discourse in France.

Now Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris-8-Saint-Denis, he recently published Le Temps du Passage. At the origins of the beauty revolution (La Fabrique, 2020).

Edgar Morin-(1921-)

 

Former resistance fighter, Edgar Nahoum was born in Paris in 1921, Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist. A student during World War II, he joined the anti-communist movement in 1942 and became commander of the French fighting forces in 1943. After the war, he drifted away from the Communist Party and joined the CNRS in 1950. Committed against the war in Algeria, he fits more into the movement of Barthes and Merlo-Ponti than Sartre, then he goes on to teach in Latin America in the 1960s.

Being concerned with working for peace and reconciliation, he is involved in several movements, notably sponsoring the French coordination for the Decade of Peace and Culture of Nonviolence created in 2000. His thinking focuses above all on the notion of complexity. , which he first formulated in Science Awake Conscious (1982). He then defines a complex as "what is knitted together", which would lead him to study the question of links in detail and develop the term "connection".

His major work, The Method, consists of six volumes published between 1977 and 2004, and is akin to an encyclopedia of method from the perspective of nature, life, knowledge, humanity and ethics. He just published Let's Change Ways. Lessons of the Coronavirus (Denoel, 2020).

Jean Luc Marion-(1946-)

 

Jean-Luc Marion, a leading philosopher of deconstruction rooted in contemporary Christian thought, is part of the current of phenomenology. Claiming the dual heritage of Husserl and Heidegger on the one hand and Christian theology on the other, he proposes an original philosophy that has been considered by some as a "theological turn". A member of the French Academy since 2008, he is professor emeritus at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and teaches at the University of Chicago, where he replaced Paul Ricoeur. He was invited to give the Gifford Lectures in Scotland in 2014, an annual course that aims to bring lively reflection on theology and strong symbolism to the discipline, as Henri Bergson, Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricoeur have intervened there in the past.

An expert in Descartes, his work focuses on the history of metaphysics from a Cartesian angle, the phenomenon of the gift, Christian theology and love as a means of ethics under the influence of Levinas. Author of given (PUF, 1998), negative certainties (Grasset, 2010), given restoration (PUF, 2016) or brief apologies for the Catholic moment (Grasset, 2017). He has just signed In addition, Revelation (Grasset, 2020).

Julia Kristeva(1941-)

 

Born in Bulgaria in 1941, French linguist, semiotician, and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva is a woman of letters who, through thirty books dedicated to various female figures of intellectual life, has become a reference of contemporary feminism. A university professor specializing in comparative literature and an honorary member of the Institut Université de France, Kristeva has devoted much of her work to the question of language, women writers, and to herself the question of exile and strangeness.

In 1973, she defended a thesis in linguistics, then founded the Roland-Barthes Center. In 2008, she also created the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for the Liberation of Women. Her name is sometimes linked to that of Philip Sollers, whose life she shared for more than fifty years.

Her work lies between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary analysis. In 1966, Kristeva coined the notion of "intertextuality", an essential notion in literary studies today. In The Revolution of Poetic Language (1974), she develops the theory that the symbolic and figurative are at the core of meaning in language.

Barthes comments on her work and believes that it is marked by "dynamism". It is this still movement that would guide the writing of Strangers to Ourselves (1988), in which she questions exile and migration.

With Le genie féminine: la vie, la folie, Les mots (three volumes, published between 1999 and 2002), she focuses on three great female figures, Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette. Her latest published work is dedicated to the Russian author, Dostoyevsky, (Bouchet-Chastel, 2020).

Francois Julien (1951-)

 

A noted philosopher, Hellenist, and Sinologist, François Julien was president of the Collège International de Philosophie from 1995 to 1998 and currently holds the chair on otherness created at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'homme. Several conferences have been organized around his idea, both in France and around the world, and in 2010 he received the Grand Prize of Philosophy from the French Academy for all his work.

Having studied Chinese language and thought in Beijing and Shanghai in the 1970s, he is concerned, in his work, to offer a distance from our traditional approaches to philosophy.

According to Julien, we often confuse uniform (i.e. to say the same) with universal, and he says that if we are interested in intervals, that is to say, it is possible to produce a true "general". . that separates us from others.

For him, the common is therefore born of a "between" (between cultures, between differences) in tension, which does not lead to assimilation by similar cold cultures and closing identities, but to the productive, always dynamic, always necessity. Investigation.

Thus, a strong element of his philosophy is the initiation of an idea of "the living", which intends to break with the dominant orientation of Greek thought, namely the idea of being. He then came out with a new concept of existence, which has nothing to do with the European existentialism of the 20th century.

In 2015, he published a text that aims to summarize the main axes of his thought: Being to Living, Euro-Chinese Lexicon of Thought. In 2018 an issue of Cahiers de l'Herne is dedicated to him. He is one of the most translated and commented upon contemporary thinkers in the world. It has a lot of influence in China.

There are several works presenting the idea of François Julien, the most recent of which is François Julien, an adventure that disturbs philosophy (Grasset, 2020) by François L'Yvonnet.

Holder of the chair on otherness at the Fondation Maison des Science de l'homme, he recently signed Real Life (L'Observatoire, 2020) and Politique de la décocidence (L'Herne, 2020).

Pascal Brueckner (1948-)

 

French novelist and essayist, it was under the direction of Roland Barthes Pascal Brueckner defended a thesis in 1975 dedicated to sexual emancipation, the body of each being accessible to all. Since the mid-1980s, Bruckner has taught at several American universities as well as at Science Po (Paris).

At first close to a moderate leftist represented by the Unified Socialist Party in the 1970s, he was associated with a movement of "new philosophers" – like his colleague and longtime friend Alain Finkelkraut, with whom he arrived on the scene. French intellectual Four Hands by publishing, in 1977, the successful essay in love Le nouveau disorder.

Today, Brueckner is particularly known for his commitments in international politics (on the question of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, on the conflicts following the breakup of Yugoslavia), and for his critical positions on Islam or ecology. Editor at Grasset, he regularly appears in the press.

His publications include The Temptation of Innocence (Médici Essay Prize, 1995), Misery of Prosperity (Best Economics Book Prize, Today Prize, 2002), Un Bon Fils (2014), La Sagesse Money (2016) or A Brief Eternity. Philosophy of Longevity (2019). His work is published by Grasset and translated into around thirty countries. After An almost perfect culprit. The construction of the white scapegoat (Grasset, 2020), is about to publish In the friendship of a mountain. A small treatise on elevation (Grasset).

Regis Debray (1940- )

 

Philosopher and writer, Régis Debray entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1960, where he followed a classic course, until the aggregation, at the same time as he was active in the Union of Communist Students. In 1965, he left his post as a high school teacher after only a few months to go to Cuba, where he became closer to Che Guevara, whom he followed to Bolivia. He published Revolution in the revolution in 1967, where he offered a theory of guerrilla warfare. The same year, he was arrested by the CIA and sentenced to thirty years of military imprisonment in Bolivia. An international campaign orchestrated by Jean-Paul Sartre in his favor will allow him to be released after more than three years of imprisonment.

Debray remained close to Third World circles, and his thought subsequently evolved to take an interest in the republic and the question of secularism. His interest in the question of the sacred led him to found "Mediology", which he identifies as the study of message transmission media since it is the nature of its transmission that would determine the sacred. He is more recently the author of works that have surprised him, such as Le Moment fraternité (Gallimard, 2009) or Éloge des frontières (Gallimard, 2010). Among his recent works are On French Genius (Gallimard, 2019) and From One Century to Another (Gallimard, 2020).

Michael Foessel (1974- )

Philosopher, a former student of the ENS, and agrégé in philosophy, Michaël Fœssel succeeded Alain Finkielkraut at the École Polytechnique in 2013. A specialist in Kant, his research focuses on the question of democracy and cosmopolitanism. A communist activist during his adolescence, he now intervenes in the public space and sometimes comments on political news. He writes a column for Liberation, in which he worries about what he considers to be an authoritarian drift by the public authorities in recent years.

Michaël Fœssel has published State of Vigilance (Seuil, 2010) and Cosmopolitism and Democracy (PUF, 2016). Close the magazine Esprit intends to question the effects of the idea of freedom on our lives. In March 2019, at a time when some are wondering about the kinship that links the 1930s to our time, he publishes Récidive. 1938. (PUF, 2019), in which he argues that the rule of law is weakened today, as it was in the interwar period. He has just published Quartier rouge. Pleasure and the Left (PUF)

Barbara Cassin

 

Elected to the French Academy in 2018, Barbara Cassin is a philosopher and philologist and has devoted most of her research to Greek philosophers on the one hand and to the question of rhetoric on the other. During her studies, at the end of the 1960s, she was permanently marked by the work of Heidegger, with regard to the question of language.

Having participated in numerous translation works, and in particular of texts by Hannah Arendt, she turned to psychoanalysis in the 1970s, and for four years held a course at the University of Vincennes, which was then entrusted to her by Jacques-Alain Miller. She then taught at the ENA, before joining the Léon-Robin center, where she focused her research on Greek philosophy, particularly on the question of sophistry in Plato, and on Aristotle's Metaphysics, which she translated with Michel Narcy.

Interested in the links between the ancient and contemporary worlds, Cassin is concerned with developing a truly European philosophy, and in 2004, she directed the encyclopedic dictionary of the philosophical lexicon European Vocabulary of Philosophies (Seuil/Le Robert, 2004). Her interest in the question of the links between language and politics led her to travel to São Paulo, of which she was made an honorary citizen, and to South Africa, where, following the abolition of apartheid, she contributed to the creation of a school of rhetoric at the University of Cape Town.

A pillar of the French academic world, Barbara Cassin helped keep research alive and in 2010 took over the presidency of the board of directors of the Collège international de Philosophie. His latest books include La Nostalgie (Autrement, 2013) and Éloge de la Traduction (Fayard, 2016). She has just published The Houses of Wisdom. To translate, a new adventure co-written with Danièle Wozny (Bayard, 2021).

Michel Onfray (1959- )

Philosopher and essayist very present in the media space, Michel Onfray taught philosophy in high school for more than fifteen years, before abandoning this career in 2002 to found the Popular University of Caen. Dissatisfied with the way in which philosophy is traditionally taught in France, he offered a "counter-history of philosophy" course in Caen for thirteen years, which was broadcast on France Culture, and in his numerous publications, he endeavored to popularize philosophy among the general public. His attacks on Freudian psychoanalysis notably sparked a very lively controversy during the publication of Le Crépuscule D’une Idole, in 2010.

Onfray often takes part in public debates on television and radio to deliver his analysis of the political situation in France and is the author of more than a hundred books. He claims to be close to anarchism and hedonism and defends the legacy of Nietzsche. He is also a supporter of militant atheism, the foundations of which he outlines in his Treatise on Atheology (2005).

In June 2020, he launched a magazine, Front Populaire, which intends to bring together right-wing and left-wing sovereignists, and which arouses misunderstandings among certain commentators who see it as a rapprochement with the far right.