Trần Đức Thảo (Từ Sơn, Bắc Ninh, 26 September 1917 – Paris, 24 April 1993[1]) was a Vietnamese philosopher.

In 1943, he completed his agrégation with a thesis on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, being received premier ex aequo alongside Jules Vuillemin.

Though Tran Duc Thao was never jailed, he fell out of favor with the ruling Party, publishing two self-criticisms in Nhân Dân and leaving his position of authority in 1958.

[2] For the next thirty years, his profile was lower, as he worked in the rural provinces translating philosophy into Vietnamese and preparing his book Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness.

In the liberalized political climate of the 1980s, he was able to return to France for medical treatment, and there he met many of his old philosophical colleagues again, although he lived in poverty in an apartment at the Vietnamese embassy.