French Philosophy

Alexandre Kojève Alexandre Kojève, born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov, was born in Moscow on 28 April 1902 and died in Brussels on 4 June 1968, shortly after addressing officials and representatives of the European Economic Community on behalf of the French government. He left Russia after the revolution, studied in Germany and took his doctorate at Heidelberg in 1926 under Karl Jaspers, with a thesis on the religious philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov. He settled in Paris, where, at the request of Alexandre Koyré, he took over in 1933 the course on Hegel at the École pratique des hautes études. After the war he worked in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs and took part in planning what became the European Economic Community, so that his life combined philosophical teaching with a long career as a senior civil servant. ...

Gabriel Marcel Gabriel Marcel was born in Paris on 7 December 1889 and died in the same city on 8 October 1973. A philosopher, playwright, drama critic and musician, he converted to Catholicism in 1929. He did not pursue a conventional academic career: he taught for a time in secondary schools, worked as a critic and editor, and wrote some thirty plays, which he regarded as an inseparable part of his philosophical work. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen (1949–1950), published as Le Mystère de l’être (1951), and the William James Lectures at Harvard (1961–1962). His philosophy, generally unsystematic, proceeds by meditations on concrete experience, and Journal métaphysique (1927), written in diary form, is his first major text. ...