Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy
A New Reading of Six Thinkers

Develops new readings of key figures in the French tradition that together constitute a new reading of the tradition itself.

Henry Somers-Hall (Author)

9781316517901, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 June 2022

270 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.547 kg

'In his excellent book, Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy, Henry Somers-Hall takes up and explores a most basic question. 'At the heart of this enquiry', Somers-Hall begins, 'is the question of what it means to think'(1). As he pursues this question, Somers-Hall offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of the French tradition in philosophy. Among the many important claims that are made is that there is a shared philosophical problem among the six French philosophers he discusses in his book (Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze). In convincingly making his case with respect to this shared problem, Somers-Hall revitalizes the relevance of the work of Bergson, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to contemporary philosophical concerns and he thus challenges a commonly held assumption, implicit as it may be, that the post-68 generation of philosophers had moved on from the early, phenomenologically inspired tradition.' Jeffrey A. Bell, British Journal for the History of Philosophy

This book proposes a radical new reading of the development of twentieth-century French philosophy. Henry Somers-Hall argues that the central unifying aspect of works by philosophers including Sartre, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida is their attempt to provide an account of cognition that does not reduce thinking to judgement. Somers-Hall shows that each of these philosophers is in dialogue with the others in a shared project (however differently executed) to overcome their inheritances from the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions. His analysis points up the continuing relevance of German idealism, and Kant in particular, to modern French philosophy, with novel readings of many aspects of the philosophies under consideration that show their deep debts to Kantian thought. The result is an important account of the emergence, and essential coherence, of the modern French philosophical tradition.

Introduction
1. Judgement and the German Idealists
2. Bergson and Thinking as Dissociation
3. Sartre and Thinking as Imaging
4. Merleau-Ponty and the Indeterminacy of Perception
5. Derrida and Differance
6. Foucault, Power, and the Juridico-Discursive
7. Deleuze and the Question of Determination
Concluding Remarks.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF], Philosophy [HP], Humanities [H]