An École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud alumnus, he is Chair of Contemporary Philosophy in the University of Paris 1, Sorbonne.
A phenomenologist, Barbaras' works have primarily focused on the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
More recently, his readings of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka have influenced him into conceiving a phenomenology of life and accordingly, a cosmology in which man's place is to be thought anew.
His doctoral thesis, subtitled "an introduction to a phenomenology of perception" is in homage to Merleau-Ponty.
Barbaras' Desire and distance addresses the consequences of the Abschattungslehre that neither Husserl nor Merleau-Ponty managed to clarify: his idea is to be faithful to the principle according to which the fact that we only perceive one side of the things around us doesn't mean we don't perceive them as themselves.