Jean-Toussaint Desanti (8 October 1914 – 20 January 2002) was a French educator and philosopher known for his work on both the philosophy of mathematics and phenomenology.
[1] The son of Jean-François Desanti and Marie-Paule Colonna,[1] he was born in Ajaccio and studied the philosophy of mathematics with Jean Cavaillès.
During World War II, he was a member of the French Resistance, associating with Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux.
[3] According to Etienne Balibar, Desanti's originality is to be found in his choice to set aside the traditional problems of the criteria or the status of mathematical truth, whether in their Platonic (characterized by the demarcation between the certitude proper to ideal objects and the incertitude of sensible objects) or transcendental (characterized by the definition of the a priori forms of consciousness) forms, in order to attend to another question, that of the "mediations" according to which a "naive" or elementary mathematical theory comes to open itself towards its own generalization and consequent re-foundation in more abstract terms.
[5] He died less than three weeks after undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery in early 2002 in Paris.