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

'Somers-Hall has done a remarkable job covering the core components of six major philosophers in the French tradition, and he has done so within the pages of one book. It is a sign of the strength of this book that one comes to the end with questions that leave one wanting to explore the implications further.' 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]