[1] Through Jean Piaget's intervention, he was subsequently given a scholarship to the University of Zurich,[1] where he completed his PhD in philosophy in 1945 under the supervision of Karl Dürr [de] with a thesis entitled Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants.
Studien zur Geschichte der Dialektik (Man, Community and World in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant: Studies in the History of the Dialectics).
In fact, the popularity of such trends on the Left Bank was one reason why Goldmann's own name and work were eclipsed — this despite the acclaim of thinkers as diverse as Jean Piaget and Alasdair MacIntyre, who called him "the finest and most intelligent Marxist of the age.
"[6] He refused to portray his aspirations for humanity's future as an inexorable unfolding of history's laws, but saw them rather as a wager akin to Blaise Pascal's in the existence of God.
"Risk", Goldmann wrote in his classic study of Pascal's Pensées and Jean Racine's Phèdre, "is possibility of failure, hope of success, and the synthesis of the three in a faith which is a wager are the essential constituent elements of the human condition".