This double module is devoted to the study of texts by (among others) Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Badiou.  The approach will combine a broad-based introduction to these thinkers’ work in its historical, intellectual, and cultural context with a detailed analysis of particular passages chosen for their representative character.  It will also emphasise the various high-profile philosophic debates – like those between Camus and Sartre, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze and Badiou – which have been such a prominent feature of post-war French intellectual life.

 On completion of the module a student should be able to demonstrate:

• knowledge and understanding of some major developments in modern French philosophy
• skills in acquiring a range of concepts that both extend and challenge their existing knowledge of philosophy
• critical abilities to deal with largely unfamiliar material, to characterise its main lines of argument and to assess their philosophical merits
• the ability to evaluate concepts, arguments, theories, and conjectures through a process of disciplined analysis and critique.

 Teaching will be through a combination of lectures and seminars, the balance being decided from year to year with regard to student numbers.

To introduce students to the thinking of some of the most important and influential figures in recent (post-1930) French philosophical debate; also to make them more aware of the many points of contact - as well as the differences - that exist between the ‘Continental’ and ‘analytic’ (i.e. mainstream Anglo-American) traditions of thought.  The approach will be partly historical-comparative, and partly based on the close reading of individual texts.  It will cover a wide range of inter-related concerns, among them epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and politics.  There will also be cross-reference to developments in adjacent fields such as literary theory, anthropology, and historiography.

This double module will be assessed on the basis of a three-hour written examination.

What is distinctively ‘French’ about modern French philosophy?

The early Sartre: phenomenology and existentialism

The later Sartre:  Marxism and psychoanalysis

Albert Camus: philosophy and fiction

Merleau-Ponty: phenomenology, language, and politics

Structuralism versus Phenomenology

Structuralism in Linguistics and Anthropology

Post-Structuralism: Barthes and others

Post-Structuralism, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Lacan)

Early Foucault: Descartes, Kant, and others

The Later Foucault: language, truth, power-knowledge, sexuality

Levinas: ethics and alterity

Gilles Deleuze and difference-thinking

Jean-François Lyotard and the ‘Postmodern Condition’

Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Derrida: Rousseau, Saussure and Lévi-Strauss

Derrida: Descartes, Kant, Husserl, and J.L. Austin

Feminist Philosophy, de Beauvoir and since

Alain Badiou: Mathematics, Ontology and Politics

Preliminary Reading:

Eric Matthews, Twentieth Century French Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge University Press, 1983)

Gary Gutting, French philosophy in the twentieth century, (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).