The Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy

French philosophy is an internationally celebrated national philosophical tradition, and this Oxford Handbook offers a comprehensive approach to its history since 1800. The Handbook features essays written by renowned international specialists, illuminating key movements and positions, themes and thinkers in nineteenth-, twentieth- and even twenty-first-century French philosophy. The volume takes into account developments in recent historical scholarship by broadening the notion of Modern French Philosophy in two ways. Whereas recent approaches in the field have often ignored early nineteenth-century developments, this volume offers comprehensive treatment of French thought of this period in order to grasp better later developments. Moreover, the volume extends the canon at the other end of the period of Modern French Philosophy by including work on philosophers who have come to prominence only in the last ten or twenty years. The volume takes ’French philosophy’ in a broad sense to include all philosophy carried out in France over the last 200 years, and it illuminates the institutional and cultural background of this national philosophical tradition in such a way as to provide a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of its unity and of its more famous moments in the twentieth century.

Daniel Whistler, Mark Sinclair

Mark Sinclair is Lecturer in Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Bergson (2020), and is the editor of Félix Ravaisson, French Philosophy in the Nineteenth-Century (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Daniel Whistler is Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of a series of works on French, German Dutch philosophies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is currently preparing a translation of Cousin’s shorter publications for OUP.