22 Facts About French philosophy

1.

French philosophy, here taken to mean philosophy in the French language, has been extremely diverse and has influenced Western philosophy as a whole for centuries, from the medieval scholasticism of Peter Abelard, through the founding of modern philosophy by Rene Descartes, to 20th century philosophy of science, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and postmodernism.

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2.

French philosophy helped to establish the ascendancy of the philosophical authority of Aristotle which became firmly established in the half-century after his death.

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3.

French philosophy laid particular stress upon the subjective intention as determining, if not the moral character, at least the moral value, of human action.

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4.

French philosophy's thought in this direction, anticipating something of modern speculation, is the more remarkable because his scholastic successors accomplished least in the field of morals, hardly venturing to bring the principles and rules of conduct under pure philosophical discussion, even after the great ethical inquiries of Aristotle became fully known to them.

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5.

French philosophy was the first person to use the word essays, and his writings came to be highly influential upon Shakespeare, Rousseau and Nietzsche.

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6.

French philosophy uses this argument, commonly known as an ontological argument, to invoke the existence of an omni-benevolent God as the indubitable foundation that makes all sciences possible.

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7.

French philosophy's philosophy had a profound effect on it through its influence upon Spinoza and Hume, whose problem of causation was influenced by Malebranche's occasionalism.

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8.

French philosophy believed that hotter climates create hot-tempered people and colder climates aloof people, whereas the mild climate of France is ideal for political systems.

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9.

French philosophy is best remembered for his aphorisms and his satire of Leibniz known as Candide, which tells the tale of a young believer in Leibnizian optimism who becomes disillusioned after a series of hardships.

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10.

French philosophy was so highly praised by the French revolutionists, that in 1794 his remains were moved to the Pantheon in Paris.

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11.

Strongly influenced by the Utopian socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French revolution, calling for a new social paradigm based on the sciences.

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12.

French philosophy was concerned with distinguishing linguistics from philology by moving from the study of the history of individual words and comparisons of languages to the study of the essential underlying structures of language.

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13.

French philosophy's philosophy appealed both to academics and the general public from its first inception in 1889 to Bergson's death in the early 20th century.

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14.

French philosophy likens it to constructing a model of a city out of a collection of photographs taken from every angle and a poem being translated and having commentary piled upon commentary: the model of the city can never replicate the feeling of being in the city itself and the translation and commentaries can never give the simple dimensional value of walking in the city itself.

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15.

In France, philosophy of science, known as French historical epistemology or French epistemology, was a prominent school of thought with Henri Poincare, Emile Meyerson, Pierre Duhem, Leon Brunschvicg, Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyre, Jean Cavailles, Georges Canguilhem, Jules Vuillemin, Michel Serres, and Jean-Michel Berthelot.

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16.

French philosophy developed a moral philosophy based around notions of the other and the face which introduced ethics into phenomenology, which had been missing since the demise of Max Scheler.

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17.

French philosophy was best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics.

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18.

Gilles Deleuze developed a French philosophy of difference which valued the simulacrum higher than the idea and its copy, which is an inversion of Plato's method, which held the idea and its copy in high esteem and neglected the simulacrum.

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19.

French philosophy saw difference as prior to identity and reason as not all-encompassing, but a little haven built in the duration of difference-in-itself.

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20.

French philosophy likened it to Christianity, where if you accept original sin and immaculate conception, then it all makes sense.

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21.

French philosophy's argued that patriarchal cultures build male domination into their language and literary canon, and that a feminist revolution must account for this.

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22.

French philosophy's urged female writers to adopt deconstructionist methods and forward their own vision of life as a woman.

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