Essentially, despite his respect for mathematics and science, he pioneered the French movement of scepticism towards the use of scientific methods to understand human nature and metaphysical reality.
This led Bergson to discuss the 'Body' and 'Self' in detail, arguably prompting the fundamental ontological and epistemological questions to be raised later in the 20th century.
Following debates concerning the foundation of mathematics around the mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), who opposed Bertrand Russell and Frege, various French philosophers started working on philosophy of science, among them Gaston Bachelard, who developed a discontinuous view of scientific progress, Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944), Jules Vuillemin (1920-2001), or Georges Canguilhem, who would be a strong influence of Michel Foucault ; in his introduction to Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault wrote: Take away Canguilhem and you will no longer understand much about Althusser, Althusserism and a whole series of discussions which have taken place among French Marxists; you will no longer grasp what is specific to sociologists such as Bourdieu, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Passeron and what marks them so strongly within sociology; you will miss an entire aspect of the theoretical work done by psychoanalysts, particularly by the followers of Lacan.
Further, in the entire discussion of ideas which preceded or followed the movement of '68, it is easy to find the place of those who, from near or from afar, had been trained by Canguilhem.Starting in the 1980s, Bruno Latour (b.
Merleau-Ponty is classified as an existentialist thinker because of his close association with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and his distinctly Heideggerian conception of Being.
It is important to realise that, as well as holding many varying degrees and interpretations of Marxism, many French Philosophers' views on it shifted substantially during their lifetime.
Louis Althusser (1918–1990) was a key Marxist philosopher, sometimes considered to be the structuralist equivalent to Marxism that Lacan was to Psychoanalysis and Claude Lévi-Strauss to ethnology (although all of them rejected the identification).
One of his seminal works was Reading Capital (1965), co-written with Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Jacques Rancière and Pierre Macherey.
He opposed Hegel's teleological approach to history, drew on Bachelard's concept of "epistemological break" and defined philosophy as "class struggle in theory."
The structuralist movement in French philosophy was highly influenced by the Swiss thinker Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913).
Michel Foucault (1926–1984), although sometimes considered close to structuralism, quickly drew apart from this movement, developing a specific approach to semiology and history which he dubbed "archeology."
His influence is broad-ranging, and his work includes books such as Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (1975) or The History of Sexuality.
Gilles Deleuze, who wrote the Anti-Oedipus (1972) with Félix Guattari, criticizing psychoanalysis, was, like Foucault, one of the key thinkers who introduced a thorough reading of Nietzsche in France, following Georges Bataille's early attempts — Bataille published the Acéphale review from 1936 to 1939, along with Pierre Klossowski, another close reader of Nietzsche, Roger Caillois and Jean Wahl.
Both Deleuze and Foucault attempted to take distance from the strong influence of Marxism and psychoanalysis in their works, in part by means of a radical reinterpretation of Marx and Freud.
Other authors include Jean Baudrillard, who started with a situationist criticism of Consumption Society in the 1970s to evolve towards a reflection on simulation and virtual reality, Paul Virilio, both a philosopher and an urbanist, Cornelius Castoriadis, who was, along with Claude Lefort, co-founder of Socialisme ou Barbarie and criticized orthodox Marxism, Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, who developed "Non-philosophy" starting in the 1980s, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Paul Ricoeur (administrator of the University of Nanterre during May '68), Emmanuel Levinas, Vincent Descombes, etc.
The major influences were primarily 6 Germans from preceding eras - Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger.
The other important political event of that era was the Algerian War of Independence, to which the young Foucault, Derrida and Frantz Fanon went.