French philosophy
[1] The general importance of Abelard lies in his having fixed more decisively than anyone before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing, with the object of giving a formally rational expression to received ecclesiastical doctrine.
However his own particular interpretations may have been condemned, they were conceived in essentially the same spirit as the general scheme of thought afterwards elaborated in the 13th century with approval from the heads of the Church.
His thought in this direction, anticipating something of modern speculation, is the more remarkable because his scholastic successors accomplished least in the field of morals, hardly venturing to bring the principles and rules of conduct under pure philosophical discussion, even after the great ethical inquiries of Aristotle became fully known to them.
The Vatican accepted the view that unbaptized babies did not, as at first believed, go straight to Hell but to a special area of limbo, "limbus infantium".
After invoking the possibility of an omnipotent deceiver to reject the external world, the information given to him from his senses, mathematics and logic, Descartes discovered at least one thing could be known apodictically.
This theory may possibly have been influenced by similar sentiment expressed in Germania, an ethnographic writing by Tacitus, a writer frequently studied by Montesquieu.
Voltaire (1694–1778) came to embody the Enlightenment with his criticisms of Church dogma and French institutions, his defence of civil liberties and his support of social reform.
He is best remembered for his aphorisms and his satire of Leibniz known as Candide, which tells the tale of a young believer in Leibnizian optimism who becomes disillusioned after a series of hardships.
Furthermore, he caused controversy with his theory that man is good by nature but corrupted by society, which is a direct contradiction of the Christian doctrine of original sin.
Rousseau’s thought highly influenced the French Revolution, his critique of private property has been seen as a forebear to Marxist ideology, and his picture was the only one to grace the home of Immanuel Kant.
Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'.
[5] Comte attempted to introduce a cohesive "religion of humanity" which, though largely unsuccessful, was influential in the development of various Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century.
[6] Comte was of considerable influence in 19th century thought, impacting the work of thinkers such as Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill.
Although a major influence on William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the novelist Marcel Proust, interest in his work greatly decreased after WW2.
However, in the late 20th century, through the works of self-proclaimed Bergsonian Gilles Deleuze came a revitalization of interest in Henri Bergson’s oeuvre.
[10] Bergson calls this idea Duration and defines it as being qualitative, not quantitative, unextended, not extended, a multiplicity yet a unity, mobile and continuously interpenetrating itself.
Intuition is a complete philosophical method that involves placing oneself within the Duration, and expanding it into a continuous heterogeneity, differentiating the extremities within it to create a dualism, before showing them to in fact be one.
Henri Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented".
In France, philosophy of science, also known as French historical epistemology[13][14] or French epistemology,[15] was a prominent school of thought with Henri Poincaré, Émile Meyerson, Pierre Duhem, Léon Brunschvicg, Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem, Jules Vuillemin, Michel Serres, and Jean-Michel Berthelot.
Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) had philosophical views opposite to those of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, who believed that mathematics was a branch of logic.
Poincaré strongly disagreed, claiming that intuition was the life of mathematics; he gives an interesting point of view in his book Science and Hypothesis.
Jean Cavaillès (1903–1944) was specialized in philosophy of science concerned with the axiomatic method, formalism, set theory and mathematical logic.
It played a major role in existentialism and many postmodern philosophers' thought, such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, who actually began his career with a deep, critical study of Edmund Husserl.
He developed a moral philosophy based around notions of the other and the face which introduced ethics into phenomenology, which had been missing since the demise of Max Scheler.
It can trace its roots back to philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, as well as Lebensphilosophie, but bloomed with the thought of French phenomenologist Jean-Paul Sartre.
[21] In the opening pages of The Myth of Sisyphus, he states what he considers to be the fundamental question of philosophy: is suicide the correct response to an absurd world?
Likening a Godless life to the story of Sisyphus, where he is doomed forever to push a rock up a hill only for it to roll down again, Camus’ answer is "No.
However, it can also be seen as a critique of traditional western thought, particularly dichotomies and the belief in progress, influenced heavily by structuralism, phenomenology and existentialism.
Lyotard maintained that these language games lack any all-embracing structure but were brought about by technological developments in such fields as communication and mass media making metanarratives indefensible.
Deconstruction takes a text, examines binary oppositions within it from several different interpreting standpoints, and then attempts to show them to be dependent upon one another, unstable, ambiguous and historically and culturally defined.
