French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojève, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyré, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God" without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent.

Author: Stefanos Geroulanos
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 03/08/2010
Series: Cultural Memory in the Present
Pages: 448
Weight: 1.3lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780804762991


Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2010 pg. 15

About the Author
Stefanos Geroulanos is Assistant Professor of Modern European Intellectual History at New York University.